The Bronze Labyrinth
by Gerald Tarrant
Summary: Gundam X. What happens in the world of after after the New Federation, after D.O.M.E., after Newtypes, after war?
1. La Casa del Asterion

After War Gundam X: Shagia Frost  
The Bronze Labyrinth, Part I 

**Author's Note:** I know Gundam X doesn't fit into the UC continuity, but neither does it reallyfit into the Gundam Wing/After Colony continuity, which is the other option that FFnet gives. I apologize, but the UC category felt like a better fit for GX than the Wing one did. Also, FFnet's formatting is a bit strange, so sorry about that too. If you'd like to read this fic in its original formatting, please go to my fanfiction site (link on my author profile page). It's much prettier there :P

_Gundam X and characters are property of Takamatsu Shinji, Sotsu Agency, Bandai, Sunrise and TV Asahi. "La Casa de Asterión" is copyright 1949 to Jorge Luis Borges. Read the short story in original Spanish or in English translation. Please do not repost without permission._

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After War Gundam X  
La Casa del Asterión  
(The House of Asterion)**

There were times in his life when he had wondered what it would have been like to grow up in a world that was alive.

He had been born _before_. He had no memory of what _before_ was, had no recollection of a time when the earth was not grey dust and crumbling stone beneath his feet, no memory of a time before time, of a yellow sun or a silver moon or pale blue lakes like jewels set deep within rings of mountains older than the stars.

But that world had been alive.

That was _before_.

Not this - this world of new grasses and barely sprouting trees as high as his mid-thigh or the sun that came out from under the horizon line every morning to remind him that yes, there was really such a thing as morning and evening and night and the Earth was still turning. This world was living, but it was not alive. It was a shadow, a shred of ghostly hope, a tiny slice of memory.

It was _after_.

**I. sus puertas (cuyo núero es infinito)  
(its doors (whose number is infinite))**

He did not remember when he first woke up.

There was fire, and there were stars, and there was something huge and blue and bright coming straight at him. But wait, that was only his dream. Something he'd dreamed. He had always had trouble separating dreams from reality, even as a child. Especially as a child, because he'd been too young to realize that the dreams meant something.

The first time he woke up, he must have fallen straight back asleep, because when he woke up again, it was dark and he was very cold.

He was alone.

Where am I? he wondered, and touched his hands to his face, only to grimace in disgust when they came away sticky with some dark substance - some liquid - that left a darker stain on the already dark grass by his side in the dim moonlight.

It was only later, when he woke up the third time, that he realized that it was blood.

He discovered three things very quickly. First, he had been bleeding heavily from the back of the head, from his right shoulder, and from a huge gash across his stomach. Secondly, because of his injuries, he could not sit up, and in fact the only position he could bear to remain in was the one in which he had woken up - on his back, staring up at the sky, blinking at the moon. And third, he could not move his legs.

Strangely, the third thought bothered him less than the first and second ones. He was not sure why, except that he knew he would probably die here, alone on this grassy field out in the middle of oblivion, and he wanted to at least sit up and look around him before that happened.

He did not want to die gazing at the moon.

He spent the rest of night in fitful bursts of waking and sleep, grasping in vain at dreams that he could not understand. When he was awake, the pain only came when he focused on it, so he did not focus on it, letting his mind drift, staring at the stars through half-closed lids and wondering what was so important about them.

The morning came and he found he was still alive. If he shifted his neck to the side just a little bit so that his head injury was not resting directly on the ground, he found that he could look to the left. It was not much, but it was a sight better than watching the stars wheel overhead. He did not mind the stars, but they disturbed him.

When the white sun came up he found that he was lying in the middle of a large expanse of nothing. There was grass, but it was dead. Patches of rock and sand made their presence known between these large rolling swells of dead grass, and the place where he lay was on a slight incline. There was little else. No signs of human habitation, just endless ripples on ripples of dead hilly grassland, marching onwards towards the distant horizon. He would have preferred even a single tree.

A few meters away, there was a crater.

This interested him for a reason he did not know, though he did know that craters did not appear on this planet of their own accord, and he raised his head slightly, just enough so that the pain from his stomach wound did not blind him.

The crater was deep and it was wide, and from the looks of it, it was recent. Its jagged edges and deep incision into the earth, and the rocks and debris and dead grass that littered its circumference spoke of the fact that whatever had crashed into the earth here had impacted violently. In the center of the crater, there was something that gleamed in the light of the new sun.

Metal?

He shifted, trying to get a better glimpse, then hissed as the pain overtook him again, collapsed to the ground panting and sweating. It was getting hot. The shoulder wound seemed to have stopped bleeding, but the one through his abdomen had not. It was not the type of bleeding that happened when one cut one's finger, or even sliced through a limb with a knife. The blood was slow, dark, sluggish, and he knew that when it finally did stop, he would be dead.

He did not know how he knew. He just knew that it had always been that way.

The sun was stinging his eyes and he fell back against the dead grass, clenching his teeth and knowing that the end was near, yet how near he could not tell. He hoped it took him soon, because the sun was hot and the day promised to be long.

Saliva felt like wool in his mouth and he could not quite swallow, and his brain told him that he should be sweating, but when he lifted his arm, his skin was dry.

He did not remember when he fell asleep again.

**II. y tal vez de locura  
(perhaps even of madness)**

When he woke up the next time, he had not been expecting to wake up, and so he started, tried to sit up, and found that he could. The fact startled him, and he made a noise, whether of surprise or of half-remembered pain, or of shock, he could not tell.

He was in a bed. The sheets were white and cool against his skin, and the pillow was stuffed with real feathers, as he found in surprise when he put a hand against it. The room itself was small but snug, the kind of room one would expect to find in a farmer's village in the middle of the rural countryside, with stout wooden beams running along the ceiling. The curtains were drawn. There was a faint smell of cedar in the air.

He was running his fingers through his hair when he heard footsteps.

"Good morning."

The girl was young and yet old, ageless with a smooth, round face and tanned skin and dark hair, of middling height and a stockier frame that indicated a life of manual labor. Something nagged at the back of his mind, telling him that he had no time to waste with these kinds of people, poor people, and he wondered at it for a moment before putting it gently aside.

"Where am I?"

His voice came forth in little more than a whisper, and when he tried to speak again, he found it produced the same result. His expression must have been a little more than bewildered, because the girl looked half amused, half sympathetic.

"Arphais. Heard of it?" At the puzzled look, the shake of the dark head, the girl smiled. Her teeth were slightly yellowed, but even. "Not surprised. A small village at the edge of southern old Spain is not quite the place to make the daily headlines in the world, is it?"

He was not even listening, running his hands along his stomach to find the wound bandaged, clean, and free of blood.

"I found you three weeks ago," the girl continued. "I was returning home, after they'd broadcast the news that the war was over and it was safe to go home...took a detour I probably shouldn't have taken but which was probably lucky for you."

He looked at his hands, knowing there was something very important about them, knowing that he had something he needed to do but could not for the life of him remember what it was.

"You seemed to have crashed - a mobile suit crash. Were you a mobile suit pilot?" The girl's eyes watched him closely, but the words rubbed no nerves, set off no sparks. Several seconds passed, then the words resumed. "Whatever the case, you've been unconscious for three weeks. I was beginning to think you weren't going to make it."

He considered his next words carefully before he spoke them, making sure they were really the ones he wanted to say, and then said them.

"I should have died."

"Perhaps," the girl said easily. "And perhaps not. How do you feel?"

He considered this again, carefully, thoroughly checking every body part before giving his answer, and when he did so, he wondered why he did not feel the sense of loss that he knew should be descending over him at the impending realization of what his answer meant.

"I can't feel my legs."

A pause.

"I'm sorry," the girl said.

He had expected no more, so he simply shook his head and smiled, making it certain that it was none of her fault, nor none of his, just something that had happened because that was the way of the world now. Maybe it had not been the way of things when it had been _before_, but this was not _before_.

This was _after_.

"Catarina," the girl offered, and it took him several seconds before realizing that it was her name. "Catarina Valerio." There was no offered hand to shake and she did not approach him, just the polite greeting, the telling of one's name to another. For some reason he was glad. He was not used to shaking hands. He did not know how he knew that. He just knew.

Another few seconds, and then he realized he was supposed to give his name. What was that? he mused. A name, something so defining, and yet for some reason he could not seem to produce his own. He grasped for it in the recesses of his mind, tried to claw down to the depths to see where it had sunk, where it was hidden, and he could not.

"It's all right if you can't-" the girl began, turning away through the open doorway, and he held up a hand, made a sharp, cutting gesture with the fingers that said _you shall not move because I have not given you leave to go_, and she stopped as if she had been a machine, as if someone had flipped a switch and the power had been shut off. There was a fleeting startlement in her eyes. He was reminded of a flock of birds taking flight, and he dropped his hand as if he had touched something that burned his flesh, not even knowing where the gesture had come from, not knowing how he had made it so unthinkingly.

"Garrod," he said. "My name is Garrod."

**III. pero el desvalido llanto de un niño  
(but the helpless cry of a babe)**

That was not truly his name, but he was not bothered by the fact, because in this world of _after_, the taking of a name meant as little as choosing what one should have for breakfast the next morning, or what color shirt to put on that day. He had mastered these simple tasks slowly over the next few weeks, as the pain and swelling grew less, as the bandages on his shoulder came off and healed into one long, crooked scar crossing the dark skin and looking like someone had tried to cut him with a pair of scissors and failed. The wound on the back of his head healed neatly too, except that there was a bald spot there for several months over the shiny, new scar where the hair would not grow. When it did grow back at last, it was grey.

He was frustrated, sometimes. Tasks that should have come easily to him, like holding a spoon or a fork, took him days to master. His muscles were weak and his nerves did not always wish to work like he wanted them to work. Catarina was patient with him, and for that he was grateful. He would not have been so patient with himself if he were her.

Catarina worked as an accountant in the village square, which meant that she settled people's accounts with many of the farmers who brought in their produce to sell at the market. It also meant that she rose before dawn to help the fishermen bring in the day's catch from their nets and returned after dark every night because she helped the local innkeeper cut firewood for the night's fire in the common room. Most people in the village had more than one job, she had said when he asked. It did not always used to be that way. But there had been the war, what had been called the Unification War, and so many of their young men had gone to fight for the New Federation and had not come back. Her eyes were hooded, hollow.

I see, he wanted to say, but he did not see. He had no memory of a war, only the vague sense that time was flowing by him in a strong, sure current, and sweeping him along with it even though he did not want to go.

Catarina did not press him, only brought home food for him, food and medicine. He could tell she was exhausted when she returned every night, but she did not complain.

He wanted to help. "I want to help," he had said to her the third night after he awoke in the spare bedroom in her small house, and she hadn't laughed at him, simply looked at him from where she was spooning his evening meal - a cup of broth - into a bowl by the fire, and said, "when you recover, you will."

He'd taken to thinking of recovery as an obstacle to be mastered, a challenger to be bested. He didn't quite understand why, but as he became able to sit up in bed for long periods of time without feeling faint and to feed himself at mealtimes, he realized that it wasn't just the recovery. He thought of many things in that way - something to be conquered, an enemy, something terrible that he had to defeat because only then could he know he meant something.

It was rather ridiculous, because right now, at this point, he meant nothing. He was a stranger in the town, a foundling without a past, without a name, a man who could not walk and would probably never regain the use of his legs. He had given up trying to move them by this point, resigning himself to the slight comfort that Catarina had said she would see what she could do about getting a chair for him to wheel himself about in. He didn't miss his legs, not really.

It was about the third week when he acknowledged to himself that the feeling of something missing was related to neither his legs nor the full use of his arms and fingers. The legs could not be helped and the arms and fingers were slowly growing stronger. It was something different, as if there was a fifth appendage that he once had and had suddenly vanished. He did not mention this to Catarina, but in bed every night he took to touching his lifeless legs with his hands, even though his legs could not feel the touch. The feeling of something missing was like that, only worse, because while he could not use his legs, he could touch them and know they were there.

The mysterious fifth appendage was not there.

A month after Catarina had found him, he had progressed steadily enough with his recovery that he would now spend most of his days outside in the garden around the house, helping prune the shrubs and harvest the tiny herbs and vegetables that made up most of the garnishes and nourishment of their simple meals. Catarina had procured him a wheelchair. He didn't know from where, but it was electric and wheeled as well on rocky soil as it did on the smooth wooden floorboards of the house, and he was grateful to her. Sometimes when it was cloudy, he would sit out on the small front porch, a blanket over his legs, just gazing up at the sky.

He never looked up at the sky at night, especially not when the moon was full. A week and a half after he had been well enough to get out of bed for the first time, he had been stargazing and the full moon had come out from behind the clouds, and a spike of pure terror had shot through his heart, and he had called frantically for Catarina, screamed her name till she rushed out of the house to see what was wrong, and begged her to take him back inside because the moonlight frightened him.

"It's all right, Garrod," she had soothed, smoothing back his hair with her hands, which for all their hard calluses, were comforting and gentle. "No one can hurt you any more. The war is over."

He wondered if she felt sorry for him, but she did not seem so. He never found out how old she was, or where the rest of her family lived, because it seemed impolite to ask these things if she did not volunteer them, since she had the courtesy to leave him and his ruined memories in peace. She introduced him to the rest of the village as her cousin, who had been a pilot in the war and lost his memory and whom she had taken in.

She had come home early one afternoon to find him working in the rose garden she kept on one side of the house, which was set somewhat on the outskirts of the village but not entirely isolated, had come through the wooden gate set in the tall wooden fence and caught him whacking furiously at a vine that was stubbornly refusing to come loose, swearing at it. He'd noticed her and dropped one arm.

"You're home early," he said, by way of greeting.

"You don't need to be so violent with the bush, you know," she said in return. "It's only a plant."

He didn't answer, because it was again about how everything was a trap, a challenge, a battle, to him, and how could he explain that to her? She was not like that. So instead, he said, "It's how I'm used to doing things."

That night they had vegetable soup for supper, and she closed the shutters because it was a full moon night and he did not like to see the moon, nor the moonlight. He had looked at her sitting there across from him, over the wooden table that separated them, and she felt his eyes on her, stopped, looked back at him. And for a split second, something flickered, and the girl's face transformed into another face, a man's face, angular yet smooth, young, eager, her eyes changing too into someone else's.

"Olb-" he said, and reached out one hand.

But before his hand met skin, she moved, and the illusion was gone and he was simply staring at Catarina, the girl who had rescued him when he did not want to be rescued, with one hand outstretched to touch a face that was no longer there, and then he felt a blazing anger worm its way up from wherever he had stored it, because he knew the anger had always been there, even though he did not know why.

He raised his hand back, and then he slapped her.

The bowl in her hands clattered to the table.

She did not ask why, did not cry, did not even look shocked, simply sat there till the red mark on her cheek had faded to a smarting pink, then gotten up from the table, pushing back her chair, picked up her bowl and went over to the sink to wash it.

"Why?" he demanded harshly.

She turned on the tap. The sloshing of hot water filled the kitchen, and she rinsed, turned off the tap, carefully placed the bowl on the rack to dry.

"Look at me!" he said, infuriated, and she turned around, fixing her eyes on him with the pink mark still on her cheek. "Why don't you ask? Why don't you want to know? Why don't you care?"

"I care," she said softly. "But I don't ask because you do not care. What good would it do, Garrod?"

"That's not my name."

"I know," she agreed mildly. "I know it's not. But it suits you, doesn't it? It's enough for now."

"I don't want it to be enough," he growled. "I don't want-"

She came towards him, picking up his half-finished soup from the table and carrying it over to the sink in a kind of ghostly déjà vu. "Sometimes, Garrod, life isn't about what we want. Life can't be about what we want, or we would live our entire lives chasing the moon and never catching it."

He flinched. He couldn't help it. He knew she could tell, even if she had her back to him.

His heart hurt, as if that was the place that was scarred from the amputation of his mysterious fifth appendage, and something moved inside of him like he almost remembered it used to when he had something to say but didn't want people to hear it, only wanted one person to hear it, one person who...

"I don't mind, Garrod," she said quietly, coming back with a cloth to wipe down the table as he stared at her, eyes and mind and senses all confused, seeming to see a different person in her face every time he looked.

"No," he returned. "You don't mind. But I do."

**IV. la casa es del tamaño del mundo  
(the house is as big as the world)**

It had been summer when he had come to Arphais, and the autumn passed quickly and turned into winter even more quickly, so quickly that it seemed like he had not even noticed the seasons passing until one day he put back the curtains in his room and discovered it was snowing.

The spring came slowly because the snow was slow to melt, but it came all the same. Catarina had been home more often during the winter, but he had talked little to her, content to simply sit in the same room with her and mull over the gaps in his memory that teased him whenever he was still and silent enough to pay attention to them. When the ground had thawed enough, she came home one day with a basketful of seeds, and he was occupied for the next week or so with digging little holes in the garden and dropping the seeds carefully into them one by one. It was good work, meaningful work, busy work so he did not have to be left alone with his thoughts when she began again to leave early and come home late.

The man Catarina introduced him to halfway through the middle of March was hardly old enough to be called a man - he was only eighteen, another ex-mobile suit pilot, a Federation soldier who had made it through the second war and come back home once again to act as the village blacksmith. She introduced him because one night she'd come home and reminded him of his promise to help once he had recovered. He had been somewhat amused that she had remembered that particular episode, but she was Catarina, and she remembered everything.

The man's name was Masao. It was a Japanese name if he had ever heard one, but then again, in this world of _after_, ethnicity meant as little as what kind of sauce one preferred on one's food. Masao was soft-spoken, yet every word he did speak had an edge of iron to it, a sharp point that could, he believed, if directed at some target, be more deadly than any physical weapon.

It was this kind of man who would change the world, he knew with certainty, though he did not know where the certainty came from.

He began helping out Masao in the shop. He could not do much because of his limited mobility, but he carried out the buckets of coals after they overflowed the furnaces, chopped wood, ran meaningless errands through the village so that other villagers became familiar with his face. They liked him, he could see, though there was something strange about that to him, as if he was not used to people liking him.

The village pub and inn had electricity, central heating and cooling, and a large videoscreen, and on his off hours he would go there to have a beer and chat with the few villagers who had taken a liking to him and to watch the one news channel that Arphais got because it was so isolated by the Spanish coast. It was strange, this technologically deficient village in an era of such great technological strides, but the villagers did not seem to mind this at all. Catarina made her own candles, and before he started working, he would make sure there was always at least one lit in the window of the house so she could see it as she was walking down the road home. Now, they arrived home together, she pushing his chair because the house was too far from the village proper to justify running the batteries on the chair, and they lit the candles together.

He wondered sometimes if he was falling in love with her, but pushed the thought away because it stung him. The word "love" twisted something, peeled at the scar around his heart that made him remember that he was still missing something. So he did not touch it.

It was his second month of working for Masao that the blacksmith first mentioned the Newtypes.

They had been cleaning up after work, scrubbing the tables and the floors, putting out the fires and rising the big tubs, putting away the tools. Masao had been talking about the next day's work, musing about how someone's new car had thrown its hubcap in the way a blacksmith of old would have spoken about someone's new horse having thrown its shoe, and he had not been really listening until he was in the middle of hanging up his apron on the wall, and his ears caught the word, threw it back at him as he sat, not knowing what else to do but catch it.

"What?" he said.

"I said Newtype," Masao said, and there was the look in his eyes of ah, yes, you understand too. "You faced her too, didn't you? I can see it in your face."

He shook his head woodenly. Masao grinned easily. In the dim light of the dying fires, he looked like a jackal, white teeth gleaming behind parted lips. "You don't remember, but that's the power of the word. Once you've faced a Newtype, it's imprinted forever-"

"Don't say that word," he said, almost too quietly for even himself to hear, and Masao frowned.

"Pardon?"

"I said, don't say that word!" he snarled, and made a grasping motion with his hands, as if reaching back for some old, old memory dredged up from somewhere, hands on the control stick of a mobile suit, finger on the trigger, shooting to kill. Masao's face went white.

They stared at each other, and then he finished hanging up his apron and let himself out of the shop.

Catarina found him over a mug of freshly brewed beer in the pub, morosely slouched in his chair staring at nothing outside the window. She didn't say anything. She merely waited till he finished the drink and then wheeled him home.

They said we were not needed, he thought to himself quietly that evening in the light of the flickering candles as Catarina sat in a wooden chair by the window, knitting.

_You can't understand the pain of someone who has power beyond human limits...who is not needed._

"What?" said Catarina, and he realized he had said the words out loud.

"Nothing," he murmured. "I was thinking."

"That didn't sound like thinking to me," she said, putting down her knitting and staring at him. "That sounded like a memory."

Perhaps it was a memory and perhaps it wasn't. What it was, he didn't know, except when he went to work the next day, Masao moved cautiously around him, and it was he who had to laugh and remind Masao that weren't they friends? And Masao said yes, of course, and things were all right again.

**V. quizó yo he creado las estrellas...  
(perhaps I have created the stars...)**

Spring turned into summer and the seeds had planted became young seedlings and then tall young plants, fresh and green and vibrant, and Catarina began talking excitedly about the soups and stews and dishes in which the autumn vegetables could be used. He knew only how to cook a little. She tried to teach him, but he was clumsy around the kitchen. His chair only barely allowed him to reach the counter, and he could not reach the utensils. So he contented himself to doing chores around the house as she cooked, putting away books, papers, things.

He didn't know why the idea came to him, one night as he lay in bed, that it was time he started watching the moon again. He remembered what had happened the first time he tried to watch the moon, and he shuddered. But all the same, the closed shutters were a beacon of light in his vision, tempting him with their dark finality, by the very fact that they were closed to him.

He lay there for about a week, resisting the thought, and then one night he could bear it no longer, sat up in bed and carefully cracked open one of the wooden slats.

The moon was full again that night.

He gazed into its bright eye for a count of three, feeling his heart freeze, feeling the dread trickle down his spine again, knowing that the light of the moon meant something to him, something terrible, but not knowing what that something was. It pounded at his head and he slammed the shutter closed, falling back onto his pillows.

That night he cried himself to sleep.

The next night he tried again, and the night after that, and the night after that, until one night he sat and opened both shutters and let the moonlight stream into his room without flinching. The moon had been something else to overcome, after all, another battle to be won. He still feared the moon, feared the emotions it awoke inside of him, because it was the sole disorderly thing in this world he had created for himself since awakening here, a world where he was the master, the controller. He could not control the moon.

When Catarina came home one night to find him on the porch, blanket on his knees, gazing calmly at the stars and the moon as if he had been doing it all his life, she did not comment. He didn't expect her to, but as she passed him, going into the house with the scent of roses trailing behind her, he turned and grabbed her arm with one hand.

She stopped and stood very still.

"What do you think of me?" he said.

The words did not come out like he wanted them to. He had wanted it to be a calm questioning, an inquiry for the facts. Instead, he felt his voice tremble, felt a sort of desperation grip him as he waited for her answer, and he hated himself.

"Please let go of me," she whispered at last.

His hand dropped back to the armrest of his chair and she passed from him into the lighted rectangle that was the doorway of the house.

Why can I not speak when I want to speak? he wondered. Why can I not say the words I want myself to hear and that I want others to understand?

"I'm sorry," he had offered later at the dinner table, the words sounding lame again in his own ears, and she had smiled, and that was enough.

**VI. ...pero ya no me acuerdo.  
(...and I no longer remember it)**

Autumn passed with a ripple of red and gold and the scent of burning leaves, and then winter, and spring came again. He could not imagine a time when he had not been with Catarina, had not been here in his house in the sleepy village in the middle of the nowhere world, had not been a blacksmith's assistant, had not been in a wheelchair and been unable to walk.

The itch came unbidden one night as he did his daily moon watching. It was a waning moon, and he had been staring at it with his chin in his hands, contemplating it, and suddenly his mind whispered to him.

_It's time to go._

He sat up in his chair, wondering where that had come from, but it had gone, whatever it was, and so he resumed his study, hardly remembering that it had been there at all.

But it was there the next night, and the next.

_It's time to go_, it said to him, and he would look around the porch, at the small, cozy, familiar house behind him, at the familiar gardens around him, at the familiar village down the familiar path, at the familiar trees of the familiar forest, and feel the scar on his heart begin to pound like it would burst.

The next time it came again, he ground it to a halt, stood firmly in its path, and asked it, _why?_

There was no direct answer, just the light of the moon, which by this time was just a few days after the new moon, tiny and dim in the sky, but yet for some reason the old terror did not come and he simply suddenly remembered there was something very terribly important about the moon, and it was because of the moon that all this had come to pass, why he had ended up here of all places, in a village and a household where he was never meant to have been.

He knew Catarina recognized something was different, but as always, she said nothing, simply came and went about her business, kept him company in the evenings, shared meals and jokes with him, and left him to stew in his own deep contemplative thoughts. He dared not ask her what she thought. That encounter last summer was burned deep into his memory.

And the moon waxed and he thought, and at last the night the moon was truly full, he met her as she came up the stairs to the house, and said, "I have to leave."

She did not brush past him like he thought she would do, simply looked down at him and smiled, and said "I wondered when you would say that."

She bought him a train ticket the next day to the nearest large city, helped him pack a suitcase full of clothes and food and his savings over the past two years, made sure there were new batteries for his chair, and took him to the train station. Masao lent them his car, saying he was sorry to see Garrod go, but in the depth of his eyes, there had been a sort of relief, as if he was glad the ghost was passing out of his life and on into another part of the world.

He did not know where he was going, only that he had to go. That much the moon had told him that night, that there was business yet unfinished, duty yet left undone, and in order to find peace with himself and what he had yet to do, he could not stay here.

Catarina stood with him on the train platform watching the shiny new bullet train pull in, helped him get on and put his suitcase next to his chair so he could reach it easily.

"Do you have enough money?" she said.

"You know I do," he replied, knowing that at last this was goodbye and suddenly not bearing to see her go. He looked up at her, hoping to see she was still smiling, so he could know that she would be all right and perhaps she would be waiting for him when he saw her again, whenever that would be.

But she was not smiling. There were tears in her eyes, and without warning, she dropped to her knees beside him and kissed him, a long, hard kiss on the mouth. He froze at first, not expecting it, then let his eyelids flutter shut as the kiss ended almost before it had began.

"Goodbye," her voice said above him, a songbird trilling, a wind's soft breath in the trees, the whisper of stardust.

When he opened his eyes again, the train doors were hissing shut, the conductor's voice was on the comm announcing departure, and she was gone.

There were no certainties in this world.

There had been no certainties in the world of _before_ either, but at least the earth had been old then, the world of a hundred million years in the making, carefully formed and shaped by civilization after civilization, each giving its own unique, irreproducible stamp which had been part of the evolution of time.

But now, in this new world, a world of change that was too fast and too far, there were even fewer certainties. Waking up every day knowing that the sun would rise was no longer even one of them, for who knew when such a war would come again, a war that could block even the sun and make the cloud's rain turn to ashes?

But at the same time, this was the only world he had ever known. It was not the world of _before_, but it would do, because it was not his choice to make when he would live and when he would die, only that he was alive and he was searching for something.

It was a world of renewal, a world of rebirth, a world where hope would spring from the cracks of the dried earth. There had been a war, and many people had died, and now the war was over.

The _after_ world. The _after_ war.

Because there was no _before_. There was only _after_.

**¿Como será mi redentor?, me pregunto.**  
_(What will my redeemer be like, I wonder.)_  
**  
¿Será un toro o un hombre?**  
_(Will he be bull or man?)_  
**  
¿Será tal vez un toro con cara de hombre?**  
_(Could he possibly be a bull with the face of a man?)_  
**  
¿O será como yo?**  
_(Or will he be like me?)_

**end part I**


	2. Where the Oceans Die

After War Gundam X: Olba Frost  
The Bronze Labyrinth, Part II

**NOTE:** I don't think I made mention of this, but since someone asked, this is a "kind of AU" fic. You'll see at the end. I'll post the long author's notes after all of the chapters are up. Thanks for reading! 

_Gundam X and characters are property of Takamatsu Shinji, Sotsu Agency, Bandai, Sunrise and TV Asahi. "The Soul Cages" is copyright 1991 to Sting. Please do not repost without permission._

* * *

**After War Gundam X  
Where the Oceans Die**

_The boy child is locked in the fisherman's yard  
There's a bloodless moon where the oceans die  
A shoal of nightstars hang fire in the nets  
And the chaos of cages where the crayfish lie_

The last thing Olba Frost had expected, after they had pulled him from the wreck of his Gundam, was for them to bundle him onto a medical transport bound for some Earth port which he did not know the name of, and rush him into emergency surgery.

He had expected at least the one who had managed to crack open the melted, fused metal of the ruined cockpit to be carrying a gun, a weapon, something pointed between his eyes, saying, this is for you and all the pain and suffering you have caused the world, and here is your final judgement.

He would have preferred that. Because his brother was dead.

He had not actually seen Shagia die. He was grateful for that, because it would probably have driven him mad if he had. He had seen the bright beam from the Gundam X's cannon, had screamed in terror and tried to drag his brother's Gundam aside. If he hadn't, perhaps he would have died and Shagia would still be alive, because all he had managed to do was throw Virsago in the path of the incoming blast, and his brother's mobile suit had shuddered, strained, and then exploded.

Ashtaron had been thrown clear, tumbling over on itself as he tried frantically to work the flight control surfaces through bits of sparking electrical connections and the smell of something burning in the cockpit, and there had been a smaller, more muffled explosion somewhere close by his head, and when he eventually opened his eyes, space was quiet and his brother was not there.

He had clutched his head and screamed. Then he had fainted.

The men who had rescued him hadn't even said a word, just cut him loose from the straps and taken him away. He had resisted as much as he was able, because he had done something to his right arm and he couldn't quite see out of his right eye because so much blood was running down from his forehead, blinding him. But he had tried to tell them no, he was staying here. Right here, in space, to die like his brother had died, because without Shagia there was nothing.

They hadn't listened, of course. He hadn't expected them to.

Olba hated hospitals. He hated them even more than he hated other people, and that was saying quite a lot, because he hated other people more than he hated most other things, too. But there was something about the quiet wariness of a hospital's walls, something that was oppressive, waiting, closing in around him, mocking him. He heard it now more than ever, because he was alone.

Other people did not understand what that word meant - _alone. Alone_ to them meant solitary, one person quiet and in tune with his surroundings, waiting for the next great word the universe might throw at him and preparing to catch it, whatever it might be. But Olba knew differently. There was nothing that could truly describe the sheer terror of _alone_, because _alone_ meant that he had been cut loose, set adrift, cast aside. _Alone_ meant that for the first time in his life, for the first time in his waking memories, the thoughts he heard in his own head were simply...his own thoughts.

For the first few days he had struggled to grasp that idea, to try and give it some life, to stand it up on some kind of pedestal or maybe frame it in some kind of metal frame to hang on the wall so he could stare at it and figure out exactly what it meant. Because he did not know. All he knew was that it was a great, hollow, echoing emptiness in his mind and his heart every time he woke up, painful with a pain that transcended tangible human sensory experience, so painful that he could barely keep from screaming. So he would try with all his might to fall back asleep, and when he slept, he would dream of Ashtaron and Virsago and the Gundam X all locked again in combat, and he saw his brother die. Over and over.

And then he would wake up.

He wanted to kill himself but he did not know how. For all the medical attention that had been given him, he knew he was still a prisoner of war. The lock on his hospital door and the alarms that were obviously activated by his bedside, warnings of his every move, were enough evidence of that. If he could have at least explained to his captors that if they would just shoot him, they would be doing him and the rest of the world a very huge favor, he would have. But he never saw them, just a few nurses and sometimes a doctor who would come in and inject him with something or to take his temperature and record his vital signs on some tablet.

He didn't know how long it had been since he had been pulled from the wreckage of Ashtaron and carried down to this hospital, but on the eighth day after he had first woken up to see the white hospital ceiling staring back down at him, someone came in who was neither a nurse nor a doctor.

This man was unremarkable, bland in appearance, nondescript in a three-piece suit, with quiet eyes and a weak chin, and Olba almost sneered at him before he remembered that he would gain nothing by doing so. So he kept quiet.

"Mr. Frost," the doctor said, without preamble. "Someone is here who would like to see you."

Olba kept quiet, still. It was hard, but he did.

"Good morning, Olba Frost," said the man. "My name is Keesler Swallow, and I'm your lawyer."

Olba blinked. Twice.

"You'll probably find it odd that you had a lawyer while you were laying in bed unconscious, but there have been negotiations going on for the past two weeks for you, and seeing as they just ended, I thought I'd come by and meet the man I have been representing."

"Sounds fine," Olba sneered, unable to resist, knowing he was supposed to be keeping quiet but it was too much for him. "Makes me sound like I'm some kind of vegetable. How noble of you, to take someone's case who you've never seen."

The man simply smiled, and Olba seethed, wanted to pound the smile on that bland face in until the man was a puddle on the floor. "Actually, Mr. Frost, I've been in to see you quite a few times, but you have been unconscious for all of them."

Olba eyed the man warily, wondering if he was going to produce a gun in the next few seconds and shoot him at last. Sometimes the quietest ones could be the most dangerous. Maybe there was hope.

But no, Olba's hope deflated in the next instant when the man smiled again and said, "Whatever the case, Mr. Frost, I am pleased to tell you you've been acquitted of your war crime charges and are no longer considered an international prisoner of war."

"That's not right," he said desperately, the words escaping him before he could stop them, and the lawyer frowned.

"Mr. Frost-"

"Kill me," he begged, knowing he could not move from the bed, but begging him with his eyes, begging, hoping he'd see the longing there, the need. "Please kill me. End it. I want...I need..."

There was a certain wariness in the lawyer's face that had not been there before, and Olba wanted to cry. But he couldn't, not in front of this neatly dressed lawyer with the bland eyes, because he realized that this man did not understand. And then he realized that there was most likely not another soul in the world who could understand, because his brother was dead, and he collapsed back to the bed in despair.

"You'll be leaving the hospital as soon as your injuries are healed enough for you to be transported," the doctor said from the lawyer's side, and Olba wanted to strangle him. Would have if he could move his hands well enough. Because neither of them understood. No one understood. What it was like to be so alone.

"I don't want to leave," he announced.

"I'm afraid you have no choice," the lawyer returned, obviously trying to sound soothing, but to Olba's ears only sounding snide, superior, secure in his own victory. Victory because they had everything now and he had nothing. "I believe your discharge date is coming up soon, and the state is not willing to pay for your medical expenses after that."

"And someone else is?" He could hardly believe that.

"Apparently so," the lawyer said. "Sleep well, Mr. Frost."

Before Olba could ask anything else, the two of them, the doctor and the lawyer, were gone through the hiss of the closing door.

_Where is the fisherman, where is the goat?  
Where is the keeper in his carrion coat?  
Eclipse on the moon when the dark bird flies  
Where is the child with his father's eyes?_

He found out all too what it meant to be leaving, as the morning of his discharge date arrived, and the nurses came in to wheel him out.

He had graduated from lying all day in bed to only lying part of the day in bed and spending the rest of it in some sort of makeshift wheelchair with a reclining back and leg rest and a tray table so he could take his meals on it while staring morosely out the window at the sea of trees that surrounded this place. Trees, as far as the eye could see, brown and gray branches swimming up out of an ocean of green.

He hated it.

Olba was sure he would hate this new place too, but all the same he was glad to leave the trees behind, though he was quite sure he was going to prison and had no illusions of ever getting out again. It was all right, though, because at least in the prison he could curl up in a corner and refuse the food they would try to give him, and maybe he could starve to death.

The nurses didn't speak to him as they pushed him down the hallway in his makeshift wheelchair, and he didn't speak to them either, just propped his chin up with one hand and glared at everyone that happened to glance his way, even with the slightest twitch of the eyes. There was a little girl running down the hallway and he caught her eye and he glared and she burst into tears.

It was petty, but he didn't care.

They gave him paperwork to read and sign, but he didn't read, just signed, because what did it matter, anyway? He had already signed his soul over to the devil once, not in such tangible form, but the marks were still there, and he should have died up there in space, but he hadn't.

He didn't know why.

The paperwork was handed back over and there was the sound of clicking on computers and he scratched one arm restlessly, noticing only afterwards that his fingernails had grown very long and he'd left long red marks up and down his forearm, like claws. He made a face.

"Time to go, Mr. Frost."

It was the damned lawyer again. He rolled his eyes.

"Get lost."

As he had known, the lawyer smiled his smooth lawyer smile, and for the first time Olba noticed that smile didn't reach his eyes. He smiled like the leader of the New Federation had smiled when Shagia would whisper something to him, something smooth and false and entirely believable, and the president would smile. Just like that.

He almost reached out to tell his brother about the lawyer, to tell him that he was another one of _those_ kinds of men, and found himself staring into the void of nothing, because it was just not there anymore. He shuddered, recoiled, tried to stop the tears that came involuntarily to his eyes.

"Mr. Frost, are you all right?"

"Shut up," he said.

The lawyer did not smile this time, just stared with a look that Olba realized was something like pity. He wondered if the lawyer thought he was insane. "Let's be off," the man said, grasping the handles of Olba's chair, and Olba realized they were at the front door, and beyond the door was a walkway and then beyond the walkway there was a car.

"Where are you taking me?" he demanded with a jerk of the wheelchair's arms, but the lawyer's pace didn't stop, didn't even slow, simply guided the chair between the opening of the automatic glass doors.

"You'll see."

He didn't like that answer, but sensed it was all he was going to get out of the man for the time being. Once upon a time, when he hadn't liked an answer, there were myriad ways he could have gone about getting a better, more satisfactory one. That was when Olba Frost had been Olba Frost, Gundam pilot, New Federation colonel, mercenary for hire, world revolutionary.

Now, he was just Olba Frost, prisoner.

He might be young, and he might be naive, and perhaps he was stupid. But in that moment, as he sat in a wheelchair helpless to walk because his legs had been broken, wheeled down the path by a man he did not know and who had decided his fate for him because he had no power any longer to decide his fate for himself, he realized that the war of which he had dreamed for so long was indeed over.

And he, Olba Frost, was the loser.

_He's the king of the ninth world  
The twisted son of the fog bells toll  
In each and every lobster cage  
A tortured human soul_

He fell asleep five minutes into the car ride and woke up as the car pulled into a long, narrow lane between two rock faces. In the distance, he could see a suspension bridge. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he peered outside the window and saw, as far as he looked in any direction, an ocean of trees.

Feeling more resigned than anything else, he dozed as the car crossed the bridge and crossed under and into the canopy of trees. It was quiet here, quiet and cool, and little spears of sunlight streamed down from where the netting of branches did not mesh near enough to provide a complete blanket against the light, but other than those odd, broken places, it was nearly dark with the darkness of dusk.

Olba had always preferred the darkness.

The car broke from the tree canopy with a suddenness that seemed almost supernatural, and he pressed his forehead to the glass, blinking at the large house that seemed to rise up in the middle of the forest like a ghostly memory. It was not quite large enough to be called a mansion, but not small enough to be just a house. It was old, he could tell, because even from some distance, he could see the ivy clinging to its walls.

A house that had escaped the destruction of the colony drop? He had never heard of such a thing.

His curiosity grew as the car wound its way down meandering roads towards the house, and he almost forgot the sense of aloneness that had been squeezing his mind since he had woken up in the hospital, the feeling which he had almost grown accustomed to, if not almost fond of. It was not that he liked it. He hated it. But it was part of him now, just like the telepathy had been part of him, and it was always there to remind him of everything he had lost.

It was, he supposed, a fitting punishment for his crimes.

The house was surrounded by a high stone wall that was obviously new - smooth, cut stone that was too white and too bright to be part of the original building. The cat stopped at the elaborate, iron-wrought gates, and as they swung smoothly open, Olba saw a vast white and green courtyard, white stone and green grass. A large stone fountain bubbled merrily in the center of the smooth grassy field, and there were little birds everywhere, twittering from branch to branch of the slender saplings which he did not know the name of, landscaped so carefully around the fountain.

"What is this place?" he demanded, but there was a pane of glass separating him from the front seat. If the lawyer or the driver heard him, neither of them turned around. He did not expect that, but he would have liked an answer.

He supposed he could either sit and glare at the backs of their heads, or look out the window and enjoy his last few moments of freedom, so he looked out the window instead. The mountains were quite close, and there seemed to be at least one, if not more, sharp and craggy cliffdrops into nowhere. When his legs healed, if he still had not found a satisfactory way to find someone to kill him, perhaps he could jump off one of the cliffs.

The car pulled up to the door and there was a silence as the purr of the engine cut and he was sitting in a cocoon of nothingness, with the nothingness in his ears and the nothingness in his mind, and he wondered if that was what it was like to be dead.

_Can you hear me, niisan?_

Then the car door opened and the lawyer was pulling out his chair, helping him into it. He looked up at the house, realized that there were at least two sets of stone steps leading up to the massive front entrance, and opened his mouth before then realizing someone had built a wooden ramp on one side of the stairs. It was crude and hastily constructed, by the looks of it, but functional.

Interesting.

The inside of the house was dark and cool. It was elegantly furnished, but not overly gaudy, with dark wine-purple draperies and mahogany wood furniture, tiny crystalline sculptures on mantle of the foyer fireplace and a tinkling crystal chandelier that hung overhead, lit with the softest of soft glows so that everything around him seemed also to be glowing with the faintest of light. Shagia would have loved this place, Olba realized, and the ache that thought brought to his heart was so strong that he almost keeled over in his chair, clutching his chest. Tears burned in his eyes.

"Your clothes," the lawyer said, setting down a battered-looking suitcase next to him, and Olba stared.

"I don't have any clothes."

"You do now."

Olba was about to reply, the retort on the tip of his tongue, and found himself staring at the man's outstretched hand. The skin of the lawyer's hand was very tan, he realized, in contrast to the paleness of his face. He wondered how one man could have such different shades of skin.

"Goodbye, Olba Frost," the lawyer said, and Olba realized that he was supposed to shake the man's hand, except he'd never shaken anyone's hand in his life. He had never had to. People of his position, of his rank and of his social standing did not shake hands.

He stared at it.

The lawyer sighed, removed the hand. Olba could feel the man's eyes on him, judging, gauging, and then the door slammed with a final sigh.

It was quiet.

Olba let his eyes wander around the room, wondering if this was some sort of test - if he was to wander the house on his own and he would come across some horrible secret as to why he was to be left here. He tried not to be too conspicuous as he gazed around at the walls, at the door, just in case they thought he would want to steal some of the trinkets. He was not a thief. He was a soldier and a mobile suit pilot.

The world just hadn't understood, that was all.

Just as he had decided that it would be best for him to at least head into one of the many entrances surrounding the foyer to see what he could find, he heard voices coming seemingly from overhead, footsteps on what sounded like stairs. He froze, tucked one strand of hair behind his ear, wiggled his toes inside the clunky cast covering his left leg. His right toes weren't doing so well, but he had discovered yesterday that he was able to wiggle his left toes, and was quite proud of the fact.

Not that he would ever admit that to anyone.

The footsteps stopped, the voice grew louder, then the footsteps pounded down the rest of the stairs, slowing as they came to the end, turning into clicks on the wooden floor as whoever it was rounded the corner and entered the room.

Olba was not prepared for the sight of the pale, young face under the shock of bright golden hair, the pale blue eyes looking out at him over a pointed, hawk-like nose that spoke of the bloodline of the old European nobility. He had hated people like that before this, hated them because they were born to a power and prestige that he and his brother had had to earn through hard work and years of struggling and much blood.

But now he simply stared at the boy who was standing in the doorway with a strange expression in his eyes, not sure whether to smile or frown, and said, "Who are you?"

"You don't remember me?" the boy wondered, and the delicate mouth curved into a shy smile. "I suppose not. We've met before. I'm Caris Nautilus."

_"I have a wager," the brave child spoke  
The fisherman laughed, though disturbed at the joke  
"You will drink what I drink, but you must equal me  
And if the drink leaves me standing, a soul shall go free."_

He didn't remember much of the rest of that afternoon, as Caris had picked up his bags for him and showed him how to use the elevator to get up and down from his room on the second floor, had showed him around the house, which was a little bigger than it had appeared on the outside, but not much.

Caris Nautilus was a Newtype.

Not a true Newtype, it was true, but a Newtype nonetheless, one of the creatures Olba had sworn forever to hate, on which he had promised with all his heart to take his revenge, because they had been good enough and he hadn't. Never mind that the system they had been good enough for had toppled in the end, leaving them adrift, shadows of their own power. There was something, a certain ring of the word Newtype that sent his blood burning and his skin prickling.

He hated Newtypes.

So why he did not hate Caris, he didn't know, but as the boy rolled him along the corridors of the house in his wheelchair, he nodded politely to the words coming from the boy's mouth and looked where Caris told him to look, repeated obediently the advice Caris told him to pay attention to, such as _don't try and go down that back stairwell when you start being able to walk, because the back door is always locked_, or _if you take the elevator to the third floor, you'll be able to access the laundry room that way, if you'd like_.

Caris had been in that final battle, against the two of them, in league with the Gundam X, and now he remembered the boy, the artificial Newtype. Shagia had dismissed him, calling him worthless, a piece of cheap human-manufactured labor that was no more useful than a broken machine. Such were all Newtypes, he had believed, artificial or not. Newtypes were nothing to be admired, nothing to be looked up to. All Newtypes were simply pawns, mistaken by the world into thinking they were God's gift to mankind.

He had never thought of Newtypes as human.

But Caris Nautilus was definitely human. He had a curiously soothing voice, strong and direct for a boy who looked so young, a voice that was obviously used to giving commands and used to being obeyed, but strangely that did not bother Olba either. His speech was formal, yet friendly, and he liked to talk. He was proud of this house, proud of the fact that he was the owner of a genuine before-war 19th century house, and his enthusiasm for it would have been infectious if Olba had cared.

He had told Caris he was tired after a walk around the house, and Caris had left him in his chair with his bags in what was now to be his new room, and promised to call him when dinner was ready. He spent the rest of that time until the evening meal staring out the window at the trees.

Dinner was a simple affair, and he discovered that even though the food was good, much better than the hospital food he had been choking down for weeks now, he was not hungry. He spent most of the meal either staring out the window at the trees again or at Caris in a roundabout way so that the boy wouldn't realize he was being watched. He had spent years perfecting that technique, and he wondered if it would work with Newtypes.

Caris, if he noticed, didn't seem to mind, chatting nonchalantly about neutral topics like the weather and the history of the house. He had apparently inherited this particular house from an uncle twice removed on his mother's side, and this particular uncle had passed away just two months ago. So Caris had returned from the war and moved in.

"Weren't you governor?" Olba said. "Of some city or town or something?"

Caris said softly, "I was. But I...abdicated. I gave the position to someone more worthy than I."

Olba thought about that for a second, about those words coming from a Newtypes mouth. "But you're a Newtype," he said at last.

The corners of Caris' mouth turned up a bit and he put down his fork, folding his hands in front of him. He had very long, very delicate fingers. "Tell me, Olba Frost," he said. "Why did you start this war?"

"Because we were special," he said automatically, reaching for the one answer that he had always thought to be true. "We were special and no one cared."

He expected Caris to laugh at that, laugh and refute it, but instead the boy just looked at him with those bright, uncanny blue eyes and said nothing.

"My brother-" he faltered, faltered and then continued, rushing as if nothing had happened, "my brother and I were born like that, you see. We were just as good as the Newtypes, just as good, just as special..." He trailed off, because the rest of the passionate speech he used to know had faded in his mind and he no longer remembered it, and felt the faintest vestiges of annoyance stir, because he was sitting in this chair in front of a Newtype giving him reasons that were no longer valid, because he was no longer even special.

_They said we were not needed._

Caris waited, and when it was obvious Olba was not going to continue, ran one hand through his hair thoughtfully. "Do you want to know something, Olba?"

"Depends on what it is," he said. Let Caris think he was cruel, unfeeling, ungrateful.

"It's about why I took you in," Caris said. "They were going to put you in prison. Then they were going to send you off to a manual labor camp and let you spent the rest of your life digging ditches and building houses. And then they were going to kill you."

His head came up at that, and he stared at Caris with fever in his eyes and a bit of a wild pounding in his heart.

"Kill me?"

"But I said no. I sent my best lawyer there to plead your case, so that I could step in and claim you under my protection, and he won."

"And why on earth," Olba said, "did you do that?"

Caris' eyes came up to meet his, and something in them made him pause, for just a little bit, as if they held some secret which he had never seen before, a secret which if he had known it sooner, would have turned the tide of his life to some happier time.

"Because I see myself in you."

_"And what's in it for me, my pretty young thing?  
Why should I whistle, when the caged bird sings?  
If you lose a wager with the king of the sea,  
You'll spend the rest of forever in the cage with me."_

That wasn't true, Olba told himself in the days that followed. He could not accept that. Caris and he were two entirely different beings, two very different people in a world that, true, had forgiven the existence of neither of them, but Caris had everything he wanted and Olba had nothing. Caris had a home and friends and a peaceful existence, and Olba had the shell of himself and his tortured memories and an emptiness inside his head that mocked him day and night, telling him exactly how alone he had always been meant to be.

Not alike at all.

By the end of the second week, he could get out of the chair and walk, albeit very unsteadily. Caris had gotten him some crutches from somewhere, and he walked with their aid, hobbling up and down the long hallways of the old house, passing in and out of rooms - libraries and studies and rooms which appeared to serve no purpose except as showcases for some extraordinarily beautiful and extraordinarily useless furniture. Shagia had hated those types of rooms, that type of furniture. Wasted potential, he would call it.

The thought of Shagia did not bring the pain it once, had, though the emptiness inside his head was still there. The pain had lessened to a twingeing in his gut, like the ends of a bad stomachache. He squashed it and wiggled his toes. He could wiggle the toes on both feet now, and at the end of the third week, when the doctor came weekly to look at his injuries, the heavy plaster casts had been replaced with fiberglass ones, ones in which his legs felt light as bird's wings.

He began to read more. There was very little to do in Caris' house every day. Caris himself was almost always away during the day, and once when he asked the boy where he went, Caris had replied that he'd been offered the position of war historian by the new World Federation government, and he would be busy these next few weeks with meetings and material gathering.

So he read. He was never much of a reader before. Shagia hadn't read much - he preferred to play chess in his spare time. Olba had always felt a little bit guilty that he didn't like chess, but he had tried, for Shagia's sake, and had discovered he was good at it. But Shagia was no longer here, and he had no one to play chess with. When he had asked Caris, the Newtype had confessed rather guiltily that he didn't really like chess either, though with his upbringing, everyone always seemed to expect so. The startling confession, more than anything, made Olba smile.

Caris' house had myriad libraries, and he started to go through them all. He read old books, new books, classics and trashy romance novels, mysteries and great works of science fiction and fantasy, detective stories and sword and sorcery and what had been known in the day as cyberpunk. He read poetry and essays, treatises on politics and country studies of countries that no longer existed, books on languages and lightning and neuroscience. He did not always understand what he was reading, but he read on anyway.

It was not long before he discovered that he actually liked reading.

When he had first arrived here, he made it a point not to speak to Caris unless spoken to, but slowly he began to discover that it was lonely in the house all alone with his own thoughts inside his head, and though Caris' Newtype powers didn't involve that kind of telepathy, Caris was a living, breathing, person, and could speak. It soon progressed to the point where they would have lively discussions over the dinner table, on subjects as deep as religion or as shallow as why on earth did Caris' gardener insist on wearing the same pair of dirty blue overalls with a tear all the way down the front?

One thing they never talked about was the war. Except for that first night, neither of them mentioned it again. It hung in the air between them, and Olba could almost reach out and touch it if he wanted to, but he didn't want to, and Caris seemed to be content to let it hang there, as if believing that if neither of them spoke of it, it would go away.

Olba knew it wouldn't go away. Things like that didn't just go away. It was there like the emptiness inside his head was there, always there, but the emptiness was almost bearable now, and when he thought of Shagia it was with a certain detached fondness that accompanied the ever lessening twinge in his gut. He found one day that he couldn't quite remember the way Shagia's mouth twitched when he was amused about something, and to his horror, he found that he didn't really quite mind the fact that he couldn't remember.

About a month and a half after his arrival, when he was getting the hang of hobbling around the house on his crutches, it began to rain. It rained every day after that. Caris said it was always like that, that the rain would continue for about a week and then stop, but two weeks went by and it was still raining. Odd, said Caris, looking out the window one night at dinner, which they were having in one of the smaller studies because Caris had work to do on the computer. "The weather must be screwed up again."

Olba raised one eyebrow but did not comment at the "again." He hadn't experienced any weather anomalies here except for this one, his first, but it was a well known fact that weather all over the globe in these years after the war was unpredictable, to say the least. Instead, he concentrated on finishing his dinner. Dinner that night was scallops with pasta and some kind of soup that he was not familiar with, but which was very good and tasted faintly of garlic and butter. He tipped the last of the soup into his mouth. "You'd better finish your food before it gets cold," he said instead, "or else the cooks will have your hide."

"They can have it," muttered Caris. "My hide's not worth much these days...I'm overworked."

He did look tired, Olba realized, and worn out. "You need a break," he said, aware that his words weren't doing much good, but what else could he say?

"I deserve a break, dammit, but Jamil needs this done as soon as possible, and I can't afford one."

"Jamil?" Olba echoed, and something wobbled just a bit on his precariously balanced after war shelf of life, the shelf where he kept everything neatly organized so he wouldn't have to risk it falling over, risk it tumbling to the ground where he would have to sort it all out again, or maybe find something unpleasant that he didn't want to deal with. "You mean Jamil Neate? The Frieden Jamil Neate?"

"You didn't know?" Caris sounded surprised. "Jamil is the head of the Federation now."

Olba opened his mouth but no words came out.

Caris looked like he was about to say something, then changed his mind, thought better of it, came away from the window and sat down and started drinking his soup instead. Olba watched him.

"No, I didn't know," he said at last. "It's not like I watch the news around here."

"You should, once in a while," Caris prodded gently. "You should keep up with world events."

"Why?"

Caris blinked. "Well...because. Because they're important."

Olba's hands gripped the coffee table so hard that he could feel his teacup shaking, balancing precariously on its china rim, about to tip over. "We may not talk about the war, Caris," he said. "But it happened. It happened, and I am a constant living reminder of the fact that it did. I do not need to be reminded of it again!"

"That's not what I meant-" Caris began, and Olba grabbed the table, shook it. This time the teacup really did fall over.

"Shut up."

"Olba-"

"I'm trying," he said slowly, between great, deep breaths. One hand reached up to hold his head, which was pounding, the empty space there pounding, trying to break his skull open. He felt the void stretch, twist, inflate like a balloon. It hurt. "I'm trying, but it doesn't go away. You have no idea what it's like to wake up every morning only to be stared in the face by a great black hole, always on the edge of your thoughts. I should have died up there in space, Caris, and you should have let me die! You have no idea what it's like!"

The blue eyes blazed with a sudden anger that Olba didn't know they were capable of, but he felt a delicious sense of satisfaction at the sight as Caris sprang up from his chair as if jerked by some invisible string, taking a stride toward him until the boy was staring down at him, hands on hips.

"How about this, then, Olba? You want my Newtype powers? You can have them!"

"I don't care about your-"

"I thought I wanted them," Caris went on, plowing over him with the force of a starship hurtling through space. "I thought I wanted them, and I got them, and I realized that they all meant nothing! At least yours meant something! Be grateful for what you had!"

"How dare you-" he spat, and the empty space pulled, shrank and expanded, and he was furious, more furious than he remembered ever being except when he had gone in against the Gundam X and his brother had to pull him out and been injured in the process, and he had vowed revenge. It was a delicious word. Revenge.

All this flashed through his mind in a single instant, and he knew exactly what he meant to do when he balled his hand into a fist and punched Caris on the side of the head.

At least, he had meant it to be on the side of the head. Standing, the boy was taller than he had expected, and Caris' eyes had widened at the last second as he realized what Olba was about to do, and he dodged, not quite successfully. The punch hit him in the collar bone, and there was a sickening crack.

He thought Caris would fall, but the boy did not, did not even make a sound, and the next thing Olba heard was a similar crack as Caris' fist came out of nowhere and slammed into the side of his face. He fell back against the chair. His hand scrabbled for something, anything, and there was the dinner knife on the table and his fingers closed on it, and he brought it up, aiming for Caris' throat.

Caris twisted. The knife met air, and his fingers were caught in something, something warm, and the pressure of a body against his.

"Olba, Olba, stop. Stop it!"

"Let go of me!" he shrieked, jerking back and forth, trying to escape the encircling arms and hands that held him. But the boy's grip was strong and he could do little but writhe, as Caris tried to pull him out of the chair and onto the floor into a kind of wrestler's hold. He was aware that he was crying, that he did not want to cry but was doing so all the same, and he could not seem to stop.

But there was something he could do, that Caris could not prevent.

The dinner knife was warm and slick in his hands, and he turned it quickly and desperately, a flash of silver in the warm, golden-lit room, and aimed it towards his own chest.

"OLBA!" Caris cried, and he felt the very tip of the knife catch his shirt, just the tip, as it was turned aside sharply by another human hand, heard his shirt rip, saw the knife fly up into the air, sparkling in the light like silver wine, and heard it clatter against the floor somewhere over towards the door.

The empty space in his head yammered at him, chattered like the teeth of living skulls, and he gave a loud, shuddering sigh and collapsed forward onto the floor.

Caris' loud gasps for air were the only sounds in the sudden silence. His own sobs made no sound.

"Maybe you should have died," the golden boy said finally, between gasps. Olba did not look up, staring at the carpet which met his open eyes, carpet that was now wet with the tears which he still could not stop, and the images dancing in front of his eyes were that of his brother's face, though blurry, indistinct, because he could not really remember what his brother looked like anymore. "Maybe I should have left you up there in space to die. But the fact of the matter is that I didn't. I didn't because I remembered what I was like once, when I believed that all I needed to have complete happiness was Newtype power, and then I remembered what I was like when I discovered I had been wrong, and that I was just an anomaly, useless, unneeded."

_They said we were not needed._

"But, here I am. Maybe I'm not the best example of humanity, Olba, but I told you before that I saw myself in you. There were people who told me I was crazy, that I shouldn't help a monster like you. But if you're a monster, then I'm a monster as well. Both of us, you and I. I believed I was, once, just like you."

_The world belongs to people like us. People who are...special._

"You know what though, Olba?" Caris' voice was gentle now, his breathing easier and his voice lighter, back to the high tenor that he had grown to know, become familiar with through these long months together, and with a sickening lurch, he realized that if Caris had said that he could not stay here any longer, that he had to leave, he would miss Caris very much. "You know what, though? I don't think either of us are monsters. I think that we could have become monsters, but I believe we were saved. I was saved by a group of people who believed in me enough to save me."

"So I'm your pity party," Olba said to the carpet. "You saved me because you want someone else in your little crowd. You felt sorry for me."

"No," Caris said softly. "No. I saved you because all you needed was someone who believed in you. And I thought...that person could be me."

_A body lies open in the fisherman's yard  
Like the side of a ship where the iceberg rips  
One less soul in the soul cages  
One last curse on the fisherman's lips_

Summer turned into autumn, and by the end of October, Olba found that he could walk without the crutches. He kept them by his bedside just in case, because sometimes his legs still pained him and he would come down to breakfast or to dinner on the crutches, and Caris would ask with a worried look if he was all right, if he needed a doctor.

"No," Olba said, "It's probably just the weather."

It actually was probably the weather, because those painful spells would happen the night before a heavy rainstorm, or before a cold front rolled through, and he had a particularly hard episode just prior to the first snow of the year. He knew Caris had similar spells, though not related to the weather but to the fact that he was an artificial Newtype - twinges of pain at odd times, days when he could not get out of bed. They used to be much worse, Caris confided, but the former doctor on the Frieden had taken the time to do some studies and recommend some treatments and medicines for him which had made the spells much easier to bear.

Caris no longer had to get up early every day to go meet with strange people in odd places that were not close to home, but he would shut himself up in the downstairs study every day now, and work. He would work through meals, sometimes not coming out even for the dinner meal. Those were a little bit lonely to for Olba to have by himself, because he had grown used to having someone to talk to and joke with over a cup of coffee at the end of the day.

When Caris did come out, they would still talk over dinner. Now they would sometimes talk about the war, in soft, wary tones, knowing to stop if Olba set his shoulders back a certain way or if the food suddenly turned to ashes in his mouth and he had to put down his fork or his spoon. There were things that Caris did not want to talk about either, sometimes.

But he found that talking about the war was not as painful as he thought it would be, after all. It still hurt, but it hurt in a good kind of way, as if by talking about it, he was bringing the ghost of his brother closer to him in a kind of bond they had never had before, even though they had been closer than two people in the world could ever have been.

He had read his way through half of Caris' library when, one afternoon, turning the last page of a book of collected short stories by some twentieth century Spanish writer, he came to a realization so silly that he threw back his head and started to laugh, laughed till he heard the downstairs study door open and the footsteps on the stairway.

"Is there something really funny that I have missed," Caris wondered, sounding slightly annoyed, "or have you finally gone insane and I should call the men in the white coats?"

Olba had simply looked at the blond boy whose face had grown as familiar to him as Shagia's face had for the first sixteen years of his life, and shook his head. "I know you're overworked, and you're tired," he said. "If you need any help on your history of the war...I'd be glad to."

Caris had blinked at him, the pale blue eyes darkening to a deeper blue shade for just a moment before narrowing, then widening, then crinkling at the corners as he smiled.

It was the small things in life that made it worth living, Olba thought to himself, watching him. The small things, little things like coffee in the evenings, books, friends, watching someone smile because of something you just said, knowing that you made them happy. It was a good feeling. He wasn't quite sure if he could get used to it, but he thought he might be willing to try.

"I would like that," Caris said.

_He dreamed of the ship on the sea  
It would carry his father and he-  
A Newcastle ship without coals  
They would sail to the island of souls_

**end part II**


	3. The Queen of the Fairies

After War Gundam X: Tifa Adil  
The Bronze Labyrinth, Part III

_Gundam X and characters are property of Takamatsu Shinji, Sotsu Agency, Bandai, Sunrise and TV Asahi. "Tam Lin," Scottish ballad, this version copyright 1739 to Sir Francis Child. Please do not repost without permission.  
_

* * *

**  
After War Gundam X  
The Queen of the Fairies**

_O I forbid you, maidens a',  
That wear gowd on your hair,  
To come or gae by Carterhaugh,  
For young Tam Lin is there. _

There's nane that gaes by Carterhaugh  
But they leave him a wad,  
Either their rings, or green mantles,  
Or else their maidenhead.

Life fell into a sort of predictable pattern these days, but Tifa liked patterns. Patterns meant getting up when the sun sparkles were at about the same place on the glass of the window every day, taking her lunch outside in the garden where she could watch the flowers, knowing exactly what time she would close the store by the big clock tower that would chime its special song at 5 PM every day. They meant knowing that if she woke up in the middle of the night, Garrod would be there, perhaps snoring, perhaps with one arm around her, perhaps sprawled loosely with the covers thrown off, arms and legs splayed out over the bed. But he would be there.

Tifa liked that.

Sometimes she woke up and he would be standing at the window, one arm tucked behind his head into the crook of his shoulder, the other hand pulling down the slats of the blinds in the bedroom ever so slightly so he could gaze out at the sky. She knew, almost with regularity like clockwork, what nights those would be, because those were the nights when the moon was full.

She never got out of bed to comfort him, not even when she knew he cried. Because it wasn't her place, her story. She had played a part in the story, but Garrod's memories of the Gundam X were not hers, and she had no right to interfere. So she pretended to be asleep until he would sigh and put back the blinds and stumble back to bed, laying there restlessly, and she would wait till his breathing evened out and then it was her turn to be awake, lying there with her eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling and wondering at the ghosts which plagued them all. She wondered what he thought about - if he remembered the many people who had died because of him, if he thought of Prince Willis and the country he could not save, if he was thinking of the two Frost brothers who had most likely died up there in the vacuum of space, if he regretted any of it.

Garrod had moved back here, to this bustling village on the edge of the water of what used to be the southern coast of France but was now known as the tiny town of Durnham, because Witz had asked, and she had come with him. At first Garrod had said no. Tifa had no preference as to where they went, as long as they were together, but Garrod had wanted to strike out on his own for a bit. See the world, he said. Take a long vacation with Tifa because they deserved it.

But she knew that as long as they were together, the vacation would not truly be a vacation, because Garrod needed to be alone. So she told him she would wait for him. She would stay with Witz and Toniya, because they had an extra bedroom in their new house, and wait for Garrod to figure out exactly what he wanted out of this post-war world, the boy soldier who was no longer a soldier.

He had agreed for about a day. Then he had come running home, swearing up and down that he couldn't leave her, he could never leave her, and how could she have thought he would just go off like that?

Tifa hadn't been able to get a word in edgewise, so she simply smiled a little foolishly at him as he picked her up and swung her around, feeling her heart beat fast and her cheeks heat up as he promised that they would never ever be apart again.

They did not speak of marriage, because neither he nor she felt quite ready to talk about such a subject. Witz and Toniya invited them to their wedding though, a month after they had settled down in the town. It was a small affair, and Roybie and Enil were there, and Kid, and Paula, but that was all of the old crew of the _Frieden_ that could attend because Caris was somewhere and Shingo was somewhere and Sara was with Jamil and Jamil was important now, the head of state of the New Federation, and he was always busy. He sent a card, though, and a present. They all did. Techs Farzenbarg sent a present too, a little picture of the Frieden crew in a beautiful gold frame, but he could not be at the wedding either. He was sorry, he wrote in the card, he had planned to attend, but the new hospital they had built in the Federation capital was very busy, and he could not afford to get away.

Toniya wrote everyone back in her beautiful, flowing handwriting, and Tifa helped. They were thank you cards, mostly, thanking everyone for their well-wishes and the presents, even if they couldn't be there. Jamil's and Sara's gift was particularly beautiful - a set of silverware for their kitchen that Witz had pulled out of the box and then cursed Jamil for, because, he said, when would they ever have guests so important that they could use silver this nice?

"It's all gone to his head," Witz grumbled. "He thinks he's all important now, buying everyone these overpriced things they don't need." But everyone knew that Witz was always like that, and Toniya had told Tifa the next day that Witz had gone home and placed the silver all around their dining table and stood around staring at it with a stupid smile on his face. (_Men! They all try to outdo each other and then complain about it!_)

"I wish I could have seen everyone one more time," Toniya said when they were done with the letters, and Tifa caught a wistful note in her voice before she stopped, laughed. "But I'm being silly. Everyone has their own lives now, don't they?"

_Janet has kilted her green kirtle  
A little aboon her knee,  
And she has broded her yellow hair  
A little aboon her bree,  
And she's awa to Carterhaugh  
As fast as she can hie. _

When she came to Carterhaugh  
Tam Lin was at the well,  
And there she fand his steed standing,  
But away was himsel.

Witz had generously offered to pay for part of their house if Garrod would work for him. Witz owned a boat shop, and he needed a mechanic. The Gundam Boy wasn't a bad mechanic, or at least that was what Kid said, because of course Witz himself would never admit to something like that (said Witz) Tifa laughed at Garrod's expression and then said yes, Garrod would love to work for Witz and his company.

"You're supposed to be my girlfriend," Garrod complained later. "Not my manager."

"Well," she had said, "Sometimes you need a manager."

Garrod made her feel free. She would tease him mercilessly sometimes in a way that she had never spoken to anyone else before, and sometimes even the things that came out of her own mouth startled her. Mostly, they were expressions that she had heard the local girls say, that she had somehow unconsciously picked up and thrown into her own speech. She would blush and apologize, and Garrod would sit there and laugh, telling her not to apologize because it was cute.

No one questioned them, a boy and a girl, both so young, living together by themselves in a brand new house. In this uncertain world, there were some things that simply just were, and Garrod and Tifa just were. Witz was known as a good guy around town, and Garrod developed a reputation as his quick-witted, easygoing assistant, always there to crack a joke and kick up the dust with you, but when you came in the next day, your boat would be fixed. No questions asked.

Tifa kept a store a few blocks from the boat depot, on the harbor overlooking the blue water, and it proved to be a popular stopping place for tourists and even a few locals because of her paintings. The store was really Toniya's store, but when Tifa had started doing landscape paintings and offering them up for sale in the store, Toniya had said that wasn't right, that Tifa needed to be a partner so she could share in the profits. The paintings were nothing remarkable - a family sitting in the park having a picnic, the birds wheeling above the masts of the fishing boats parked like sunning seals out on the docks, a little girl chasing butterflies down the pier - everyday scenes that captured her when she saw them. She took to carrying a small sketchpad with her wherever she went, where she would sketch down something that caught her eye in a few hurried strokes. That sketch would later be transferred to her easel later that night, and many times Garrod had gone to bed with her still sitting there with her piece of charcoal and the light on, trying to remember exactly how a scene looked, how the little girl's smile had just been so bright, so radiant.

About a year after Garrod and Tifa had moved into their new house, Toniya had announced that she and Witz were expecting a child, so Tifa told her to take some time off, that she would run the store. "Are you sure?" said Toniya, peering at Tifa with big eyes, and for some absurd reason, Tifa was reminded of the night Toniya had secretly loaned her the tube of lipstick and she had dabbed her lips with it like it was something forbidden. The thought made Tifa smile, but of course Toniya did not know that, thought that she had smiled to reassure her, and gave her a hug that made Tifa's teeth rattle.

The store did not suffer for Toniya's absence, and Tifa secretly thought that business was better than ever, for Toniya had the annoying habit of being a little too pushy, asking the customers to buy a little too much. Tifa never said much, but would sit behind the counter sketching or inking, greeting buyers with a smile and ringing up their purchases when they came up to pay.

Some of them wanted her autograph. They'd heard her name, they said, because so-and-so who they knew had one of her paintings, and they had loved it so much they just had to get one too. She always signed, if they asked.

All of them said her name without a second thought, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to say, with a smile and a wink, are you Tifa Adil? She would tense as they pronounced her last name, always expecting, always dreading to hear after it, another word, would steel herself for their expressions to darken.

But either none of them had fought in the war or they had never associated the word Newtype with the quiet girl sketching behind the counter, because it was never once mentioned.

Of course, Garrod never mentioned it either. Newtypes or the war or the Gundam X. It was just as hard for him, perhaps harder, she knew, than it was for her, because she knew he had nightmares, and his episodes of waking up during the nights of the full moon went on, month after month.

It wasn't that she forbade him to talk about it. If he had wanted to, she would have been willing to listen, but he never asked.

_She had na pu'd a double rose,  
A rose but only twa,  
Till upon then started young Tam Lin,  
Says, Lady, thou's pu nae mae. _

Why pu's thou the rose, Janet,  
And why breaks thou the wand?  
Or why comes thou to Carterhaugh  
Withoutten my command?

Witz's and Toniya's child was born seven months later, a boy with Toniya's fair coloring and Witz's temper. They named him Barrie. Garrod reported that the baby cried all day and all night, and there were days Witz didn't come into work. That was all right, Garrod said, he could handle the extra workload. So there was Tifa running Toniya's store and Garrod running Witz's shop, and both of them went over to the Sou's residence once in a while with staples like baby food or towels that Garrod bought or dinners that Tifa made, and they would see Toniya in the living room with the baby and Witz asleep in the bedroom. Toniya looked tired, but happy to see them, and she would thank them for the gifts or the food.

Tifa's cooking was getting better, Garrod would say in response, and Tifa would shoot him a look.

When they got home after one of these visits, they would sit in bed and talk about the future. Their future, though those two words were not necessarily mentioned aloud. Garrod wanted children, but Tifa wasn't quite sure. Garrod asked her sometimes if she still dreamed of the future, and she would not answer either way, simply change the subject.

"Besides," she told him gently one night, "does it even matter? The future is not set in stone. Events can be changed, other paths can be taken."

"But still, I'd like to know," he said.

She did not keep many of her dreams from him, because truthfully, the Newtype dreams and visions and hunches did not come often anymore. Ever since D.O.M.E., there had seemed to be something that had gone away, something that was just not there anymore, but she did not feel empty, simply more at peace with herself and everything around her. The dreams that she had about the future, the ones that she actually knew were about the future when she had them, were always hazy, and she could not see much, as if everything was lit up by a bright spotlight and her eyes had been blinded.

There was one dream that had been repeated once or twice about a month after Barrie was born. There were no images, no lights, only a deep voice. She could not hear the words, but the familiarity of the voice bothered her, and she spent hours in the store mulling over the sound of that voice, wondering where she had heard it before. It was not anyone's voice out of the people around her - not Witz's and not Garrod's. She did not associate much with any other man outside of those two, and it puzzled her.

Sometimes the dream was on the tip of her tongue when Garrod would ask, and she would open her mouth to tell him only to close it again. After a few times, she decided that there must be a reason and did not try to tell him again. Dreams like that would reveal themselves in time, she knew, and she must be patient.

The baby calmed down enough after about a month for Witz to go back to his regular hours at the shop. Tifa took to stopping by at night to the Sou's house with a basket of fruit, or some fresh-baked bread, since Witz and Garrod both worked late hours. The boat shop was popular now, with the reputation growing of how both men, ex-Gundam pilots, would make your boat look like new for the cheapest price around. Garrod mumbled sometimes about how they should raise prices, but Tifa knew that he never would, that he and Witz were both too nice.

Toniya wanted to come back to the store as soon as possible, but Tifa had told her no, she could handle it, to spend more time with her son. Barrie, with his shock of bright yellow hair, had crawled into Tifa's lap and proceeded to drool all over it, whereupon Tifa handed him back to his mother and said firmly that yes, Toniya was definitely going to have to spend more time with him.

"What are you and Garrod planning to do?" Toniya said, reaching over for one of the many cloths she kept stacked on the table for occasions like these, to clean Barrie off. Tifa took one too, dabbing at the drool stain on her dress without much result.

"Planning to do?" Tifa echoed.

"You should get married," Toniya said. "It's obvious that neither of you are ever going to find someone else, and you two are already living together. It wouldn't be any great inconvenience. Besides, I like weddings."

Tifa had blushed. "We're...not sure yet," she said demurely, and Toniya had laughed and patted her shoulder, telling her that she should think about it and ask Garrod. _If I were you, I'd be putting notions in his head night and day!_

But she was not Toniya, and even Toniya knew that. She said nothing to Garrod, who came home late now and scowled at the full moon when it was full above the treetops at night. She wondered if he should start working less, because she never really saw him nowadays, and he had sighed, saying that once the first month of spring had passed, he would have more free time again. This had happened last year too, he said, except that Witz had been around more so Tifa hadn't noticed.

"It's just that people get lazy over the winter," he said. "And since fishing season starts in the spring, they panic right at the end before the snow melts, and go inspect their boats and find that things have rusted through, or something's cracked and they need it fixed now."

Tifa nodded, not letting the rhythm of her charcoal falter on the canvas. She had gotten a particularly good sketch of a bird on the pier this afternoon. It was with a start that she felt Garrod's arms around her roughly, embracing her from behind, and she sat there in surprise for a moment before relaxing against him and letting him kiss her cheek.

"I promised I'll always be with you, Tifa," he said, his voice muffled against her shoulder. "And I'll keep that promise. We've been through so much, and we can make it."

"I know," she soothed him, reaching up one hand to stroke his cheek. "I know."

That night he had pretended to go to bed, but she knew that he never truly fell asleep, and she lay there waiting for him to get up and go to the window, to look out at the full moon. She saw his body stiffen in the shadows of the room, saw his shoulders shake as he bowed his head, felt her heart ache, but knew she could do nothing.

There were wounds that even a Newtype could not heal.

_"If my love were an earthly knight,  
As he's an elfin grey,  
I wad na gie my ain true-love  
For nae lord that ye hae. _

"The steed that my true love rides on  
Is lighter than the wind,  
Wi siller he is shod before,  
Wi burning gowd behind."

Tifa woke one morning to find the frost already melted off the windowsill and the sound of birds singing in the trees next to the house. It was the kind of morning where the world was hushed and the sun seemed to be smiling a little, laughing a secret laugh, the morning that rose with a feeling that something was going to happen. The winter had been shorter than usual this year, for which she was grateful, but that meant that the spring fishing season had come early. Garrod had been getting up earlier and earlier to get started on people's boats.

The dream had come last night again, except last night she had not only heard the voice but had seen the shape of a man there. There was something odd about the shape, something that was not quite right, but it was not a threatening shape, and she had sensed no malice from the dream-figure. But that could simply mean that her Newtype powers had grown weak with disuse. She wished that Jamil was around so that she could ask him, but this was no longer the _Frieden_, and Jamil was half a continent away.

That was one of the things about being a Newtype. No matter how much she opened up to Garrod, no matter how close she grew to Toniya, in many ways, she would always be alone. Jamil understood that too.

Briefly, she considered staying home that day, but decided that there was no reason to. Wrapping an egg and a slice of toast in a towel and placing it in a wicker basket, picking up her sketch pad and a rolled canvas with her latest finished piece on it, she locked the door behind her and set off toward the shop.

There were several times on the way that she felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle and she stopped, looked back, only to find nothing there. She did not tell herself that it was only her imagination, because one thing she had learned about the power was that it was fickle, but it was never her imagination. Whatever it was would reveal itself in due time, but still, she found herself hurrying just a bit down the road, glancing now and then over her shoulder to make sure that she was not being followed.

There were very little people on the pier at this early hour, and she tucked her sketchbook into her basket before pulling out the keys to the shop, turning the lock and hearing the cheerful chimes on the door rattle as she opened it, pulling back the curtains and letting the sunlight pour in. The inside of the shop was all wood, and it made her think of a ship at sea, an old ship like in the storybooks, not like the _Frieden_. She had loved the _Frieden_, but it was not the kind of ship she would have chosen to sail on, if she had had a choice. It had been too machine-like.

She set up her canvas on the counter, bending down to search for a piece of matting that would suit this painting. It was a rather stylized version of the sky above the harbor, with thick, raw strokes of charcoal, like lightning, set off with barely-there dashes of watercolor. She wasn't quite sure if she liked it or not, but Garrod had been taken with it and wanted to keep it for himself. She'd held it away from him with a slight giggle.

"It's for sale," she said firmly. "I can make you another painting like this if you want. It's not that hard."

He had grown quiet there, his hand on her arm tightening slightly. "I'd like that," he said at last, slowly. "I'd like a..." He trailed off.

She knew what he wanted to say. _I'd like you to draw the Gundam X. Do you still remember how it looked, Tifa? Do you remember how its eyes reflected the full moon, how it would come alive?_

She didn't know if she could draw the Gundam X without having the dreams come again. Garrod understood though, because the hand dropped from her arm and he said, without looking at her. "Actually, that's all right. I don't think I'd like one after all."

There had been a very nice, thick piece of matting, blue-green like the sea or like Garrod's eyes that would make a very nice contrast to the stark black-and-white charcoal and hints of blue watercolor, and she was on her knees looking for it when she heard the door open, the chimes tinkling in the morning breeze.

"Good morning," she called over the counter, hoping whoever it was didn't turn and leave before she could stand up. She saw the matting, tucked under several other pieces, and with a bit of an effort, she pulled it out from under the stack, standing up. "Welcome to-"

The words seemed to choke on themselves, and she froze, shivered, stopped.

Her visitor must have sensed her confusion and discomfort, but he did not move to leave, simply looked at her with an uncertain expression that seemed to say _please don't turn me away, I mean no harm._

The first thing that anyone would notice about this man was the chair he was seated in - an automatic wheelchair of sorts, lightweight and skillfully constructed, very maneuverable by the looks of it. But that was not what caught Tifa's attention, nor was it the fact that he was dressed in the uniform of one of the dock workers, though she had never heard of anyone hiring a dock worker who could not walk before. It was the face that made her start, because the face under the mess of dark, curling hair, the proud nose and the square chin, the deep-set dark eyes, was familiar.

Too familiar.

She took a step back, curling her arms around herself, aware that she was gawking, but she didn't care. She wanted Garrod there, Witz, anyone. The phone was on the back counter to her left, and if she moved a little, just a little, she could reach it-

"Is this the Harbour Shop?" he said, his deep voice a little perplexed, a little wary, as if he knew he was not welcome, though he did not know why.

And Tifa suddenly realized why the voice in her dreams had been familiar, because the man who had been speaking to her in the dreams and this man sitting in front of her, his big hands easy on the arms of his wheelchair, were one and the same.

Her sense was tingling, but it was not the tingle of danger that she had expected, and she slowly straightened, looking at him, still not sure that he was safe, that he would not suddenly spring up out of the chair and pull a gun on her aimed between her eyes, because he had hated her. He and his brother both, hated her with a fierce hatred that had burned her when she had tried to reach out to them. She could still remember how much it seared, how she had never realized how two human beings could hate something so much.

But there was none of that from this man now. She reached out her mind to him, felt the simple mind of a man who had woken up a little too early that morning but was looking forward to the rest of the day, who was secure in his role of where he was and what he was doing. There was a touch of restlessness, as if he longed to go somewhere that was not here, but at the same time there was a contentment and a deep abiding sense of...waiting, and the sense of something broken. A connection, something mental, spiritual, broken.

She could not feel the _other_ who had always been tied to him, she realized. He was alone.

"Yes," she said, her voice almost a whisper. She frowned inwardly, clearing her throat and trying again, wishing her vocal cords would stop shivering. "Yes, this is the Harbour Shop. May I help you?"

The man's face cleared, and he smiled. "I'm new to this town, but one of my friends at work had one of your paintings hanging on the wall, and I must confess that I fell in love with it. I'm a bit of an art connoisseur myself, and they told me I could find some of your other works here?"

"Most people come here to look at my paintings," Tifa said, gesturing to the various shelves and countertops on which her artwork was displayed amidst Toniya's various knick-knacks and souvenirs that were also for sale. "Feel free to look around."

"Thank you," he returned, then stopped, frowning at her. "Excuse me, but...you look familiar. Have we met?"

Yes, she wanted to say, a year and a lifetime ago, when you wanted to destroy the world, and me along with it. "No, we haven't met." Coming around the counter, wiping her hands on her artist's apron, she held out one hand to him. "I'm Tifa Adil."

The look of confusion in his eyes deepened for a second, and then he gave himself a slight shake, and it vanished. She could feel his emotions so easily, more easily than she had been able to since the end of the war, since her Newtype powers had sunk into almost dormancy, and the mental flow of it startled her somewhat, but she hid her surprise.

He took her hand, shook it. His palms were callused but his grip was strong, warm, just a regular man's grip. "I'm very honored. My name is Garrod."

_"Why pu's thou the rose, Janet,  
Amang the groves sae green,  
And a' to kill the bonny babe  
That we gat us between?" _

"O tell me, tell me, Tam Lin," she says,  
"For's sake that died on tree,  
If eer ye was in holy chapel,  
Or christendom did see?"

He stayed looking around the shop for another hour, making small talk with her as she retreated behind her counter, sketching on her sketchpad with a trembling hand. His eyes were very focused as he examined each of her sketches, serious, as he would comment through the silence on how her use of color in this drawing set off the contrast well, or how much he liked the rendition of birds in this other piece.

The central bell tower had tolled ten-thirty before he finally let himself out, telling her that it had been a pleasure, that he would probably be back, and he was new in town, an accountant over at the docks, so if she ever would like to come visit, she was welcome.

She didn't remember what she said in reply, but hopefully it was something polite and non committal as he rolled his chair outside her door and disappeared.

_My name is Garrod._

It was too sudden, too soon, this meeting, and yet she could not shake the feeling that she should have known it was coming. Should have known, because the dreams had told her so, and she had refused to listen.

She wondered what it was like to lose one's memory, to forget in a single instant everything that had been important and treasured in a person's life, to have to start over as if you had just been born. Yet, through all that, he had somehow remembered Garrod's name, clung to it as if something precious, though she wondered what he would say if she had mentioned that the man whose name he had taken had once been his worst enemy.

"New in town," she mused, as she looked down at her sketchpad and ran a finger thoughtfully over the face there, at the hair that was just a little longer than she remembered, at the calm face and the ready smile that would not have been there two years ago.

She was not surprised when Garrod came home later that night, mentioning how strange it was that there seemed to be a new fellow in town, some guy who had just been hired at the docks as an accountant, whose name was also Garrod.

"Did you meet him?" she wondered, already knowing the answer was no, because he would not have been so calm if he had, and he shook his head, throwing his coat down over the couch and going to get himself a cup of coffee.

"Nope, didn't have time to get down into town today. I'll probably see him around. Weird, I thought my name was pretty unique."

Tifa laughed with a calm reassurance she did not feel. "You're the only Garrod for me," she proclaimed, and he had grinned and tackled her, picking her up off her feet.

It was later that night, as Garrod lay asleep, that it was her turn to pick herself quietly out of bed and pad to the window, looking out at the waning moon over the water of the harbor.

_Shagia_, she said quietly to herself. _Shagia Frost._

That night, she dreamed again, but this time there was no voice, no man, just the calling of white gulls over the waters of the harbor, and her hand holding a piece of charcoal, drawing the same lines over and over, the lines of a man's face.

_"And ance it fell upon a day  
A cauld day and a snell,  
When we were frae the hunting come,  
That frae my horse I fell,  
The Queen o' Fairies she caught me,  
In yon green hill do dwell. _

"But the night is Halloween, lady,  
The morn is Hallowday,  
Then win me, win me, an ye will,  
For weel I wat ye may.

It was two weeks before she saw him again, and this time she could feel him as he made his way up the ramp to the store, could hear the wheels of the chair on the wooden planks outside, anticipated the chiming of the door as he opened it and wheeled himself in. It was early, again, and the sun had just risen, and the shop was empty except for her and her canvas.

"Good morning, Ms. Adil," he said cheerfully, "I hope you don't mind me dropping in again."

Her paintbrush had fallen from her sudden slack hand, and she heard it clang onto her box of paints, distractedly, the sound reaching her ears as if from a long distance. She was painting this one, wanted to see how his face looked in full color, but she had not painted in a long time and was having trouble with the skin tone. But she did not want him seeing the picture, for some reason. "Good morning," she said, hoping he would not come around the counter. "Did you just want to browse again today, or did you come here for something?"

"I just came by to see if you had any new paintings," he said. "And I like the feel of your store in the morning. It reminds me a little bit of home."

"Home?" she said, hoping the paints would not stick as she covered it up with another piece of canvas and moved it over to the corner where he could not accidentally come across it. "Where are you from?"

"Arphais." When she shook her head, indicating she'd never heard of the town, he laughed. "Few people know where it is. There's actually a man who works at the docks who has a sister there, but other than him, I have never met anyone who has even heard of it. I lived there until about three months ago."

"Were you born there?" she wondered, curious as to his response, and his face grew closed.

"No...I...moved there. Two years ago."

"When the war ended," she murmured, and he didn't say anything to that, simply looked grave and she could feel a change in the sense that emanated off him like cologne, a subtle change, but the shift was as apparent to her as the difference between the scent of flowers and the scent of cedar. Neither was a negative odor, neither was unpleasant. They were simply...different.

"Are you originally from here?" he inquired, and she did not sense any malice from him, nothing more than a simple polite curiosity, throwing the question back at her like people making small talk usually did.

"No," she said quietly, giving him a smile. "No, I moved here about two years ago, after the war ended."

His eyebrows rose. "You came here after the war too?"

"That's right," she said, looking around for a stool and dragging it over to behind the counter, sliding onto it so she could study him more carefully. He was wheeling himself around the shop again, looking at all of her paintings, even the ones he had already seen. "My...friend and I decided to settle here after everything was over. It's a nice town, quiet, with friendly people."

"I agree," he said in a pleasant tone. "It is a very nice town. I've been on the road for about three months after I left Arphais, trying to find some place I might settle down in for a bit that would suit me, and this town has a feel to it that I like."

"Why did you leave?"

He had picked up one of her drawings, a smaller one of the sea and the sky, one where she had been particularly proud of how the waves had blended into the horizon as if there was no sea and no sky, but just a vast continuation of the same plane. He hesitated a second, put the drawing back down and turned his chair so that he was looking at her. Not directly at her, but his eyes were on her, and there was the intense gaze again, as if he almost remembered something. Almost, but not quite.

"I'm not sure," he said at last. "I just knew that I had to leave. It was not my hometown, as I said...there was a girl I was living with, and a man I worked for, and they were both very kind to me. Maybe I'll go back there someday." His tone was wistful.

"Did you love her?" Tifa said.

There was a pause in his sense, and something spiked as he looked away for a second, then swung his head around. They stared at each other for a second, the Newtype girl and the former Gundam pilot who could no longer remember who he had been, and Tifa felt something in her heart go out to him, something that was not pity but more like...identification.

"I am not sure," he said softly, almost to himself. "But I want to believe I did." Looking back up at her, his eyes were sad. "But in the end, what is love, anyway? I am just one man trying to find his path in the world, scarred by this war that was fought for some purpose which I don't understand. I want to believe that I have loved before her, but how would I ever know that now?"

Shagia Frost was not so different from her, after all. In the end, they were two of the same, both trying to find their way in a world that, after all wars were fought and all had been put back into place, would still never accept them because they were different.

He no longer had his fledgling Newtype abilities, but that did not matter. As long as he lived, no matter where he went or who he became, even if he never regained his memories of who he had once been, he would always be different. It was like being born with grey eyes. Though one's sight could be lost, the color of one's eyes could not be changed.

All of this she saw in one instant, just like the moment when she had held the shining globe of D.O.M.E. in her hands and understood the tragedy of the Newtypes and how all of this destruction had come to pass. If she did not want this power, D.O.M.E. had said, she could simply put it away. It had sounded so easy then, but she thought she understood it a little better now, that Newtype power was not just something to be put away at will. Even though it might ebb and flow and finally fade away, she was like Shagia.

She would always be a Newtype.

"You were loved, once," she said to him, clasping her hands under her chin, giving him a small smile. "You were loved."

Another spike in his sense, and an almost hushed feeling of...wariness, or maybe of awe. One hand went up to run through his dark hair, another left the arm of his chair to reach out, just a little bit, the fingers stretching toward her.

"I know you...don't I?"

"Maybe," she hedged, knowing where the conversation was going, not sure if she wanted it to go there. It was too soon, yet not soon enough.

She should have known that this day would come.

"Who are you?" he whispered.

A shadow seemed to pass over the sun, and the lapping of the water outside on the legs of the pier grew loud in her ears, great thundering whitecaps on the cliffs of some unknown ocean. She thought of Luchilu Lilliant, trapped under the dark black water of the Sea of Lorelei. But Luchilu had not been trapped forever.

Luchilu was free now.

"I am no one," she answered, feeling a little bit lightheaded, as if she was not quite solidly seated in this comfortable shop on the edge of the harbor, but part of her body was elsewhere, flying like a bird above the darkened earth. "A shadow from your past, someone who it is better for you to forget. Because hope is such a fragile thing."

In the darkness, his eyes were two bright beacons, lamps burning through the night, and there was a desperateness that burst from him that had not been there before, such a deep sorrow that she gasped as the waves of his sense crashed upon her, and it was so deep and so painful she felt she was drowning.

"Tell me," he breathed fiercely. "I need to know."

With a great effort she wrenched her gaze away from his, stumbling to the back of the room, wincing a bit as she fell across the counter at the back, bruising her hip in the process. Spots swam before her eyes.

"I think," she whispered, "that you should go now."

Something splintered and broke, and she gasped, squeezed her eyes shut, managed to hold on as her world rocked, spun upside down, then settled itself right side back up again. She opened her eyes cautiously. The sun was shining through the windows, there was the sound of seagulls over the harbor, and below, she could hear several dock hands calling to one another about a backordered part.

Turning around, she saw that he was still there, his face pale, his eyes haunted.

"Yes," he said at last, shakily. "Yes, I think...I think I should go."

_"Just at the mirk and midnight hour  
The fairy folk will ride,  
And they that wad their true-love win,  
At Miles Cross they maun bide. _

"For I'll ride on the milk-white steed,  
And ay nearest the town,  
Because I was an earthly knight  
They gie me that renown."

She could not tell Garrod. It was like the dream; she tried several times, opening her mouth to say, _Garrod, there is something I need you to know. There is a man in this town, a man that tried to kill you and a man who tried to kill me, a man who hated the world so much he once hoped to destroy it. But he is not the same man anymore. He has changed. _

Garrod, I think we can help him.

But she did not, and each time he came home mentioning how he should go down to the docks and meet this weird fellow who had the same name as he did, she managed to turn the conversation to something else. She did not realize she was doing it until after she had done it, and each time she would wonder if she could bring the topic back around. But there never seemed to be an easy way to do so, and she would forget about it.

Shagia did not come to her shop again, and that day after he had left and the sound of the wheels of his chair on the boardwalk outside had faded, she had uncovered the painting, staring at the bold strokes of her paintbrush upon the white canvas, and wondered if it was better that she just throw it away.

But she did not throw it away. There was the sense of something too, something incomplete, and she knew that if she threw the painting away, somehow it would erase everything that had come to pass, both the good and the bad.

So she kept at the painting every day as people came and went in the shop, purchasing her drawings, little trinkets for their children, tourists wanting a part of this town to take home with them before they departed. She felt a little strange, sitting in this store with people who she had never seen before coming in, making cheerful conversation with her as she rang up their purchases, and then departed, knowing that she would probably never see them again. They were the current and she was the island, standing still in the midst of their swirling eddies and flows, and though they would depart for lands unknown, she would still be there.

There were a few people who were like that, she knew. Jamil was one. Garrod was another one. It was not by choice that he was one, but he had made a promise to her and that promise he had sworn to fulfill, even though she knew his heart did not lie here in this small, sleepy town. His heart lay with her, but it did not lie with the town.

She thought about all of this, mulling it over in her mind as Shagia's face took shape beneath her paintbrush, came to life with a life of its own. She had painted him as he had looked that first day he had come into the shop - hair slightly mussed from the wind, jacket crisp and starched in its newness, a slight smile on his face and a slightly surprised look in his eyes, a look not of fear nor of anger but of wonder, of startled happiness.

It was good to see him without the fear and the anger, she thought, dabbing a bit of flesh-colored paint under one eye to even out his skin tone. The customers had gone now and the sky was getting dark. She should have been home about half an hour ago, but Garrod was home late these days and there was no point in her going home too early, and besides, she hated leaving work unfinished.

A few more touch-ups, and then she could leave. The painting would be finished soon. She didn't quite know what she would do with it, but she would think about that when it was done.

By the time the chimes on the door tinkled and it creaked open on its hinges, she knew that she should have been paying attention, should have known who was coming up the boardwalk to the wooden deck, should have felt him approaching before now. She had been careless.

"Why are you still here?" Garrod said with a touch of teasing worry in his voice as the door closed behind him. He was carrying his hat in one hand and looked sweaty and tired but happy to see her. "We closed shop early today. I was hoping I'd catch you, but I didn't think it would be likely. I know you're usually home by this time."

She put down her brush. "Garrod," she said, with a touch of breathlessness that she knew always had used to be in her voice when she spoke his name, and now had come back because her heart was beating a little bit faster than it should be.

He came towards her, swinging around the corner. There was nothing she could do to stop him. The painting was angled towards the back of the room, but it could be seen by anyone who simply walked behind the counter in her direction. "Whatcha working on?" he said. "I was wondering if you would want to go to din-"

His voice trailed off.

She stood off to the side of the painting, not bothering to try and hide it from his view. Better lay it all out in the open than keep it from him anymore.

She should have known, too, that this day would also come.

"I'm sorry, Garrod," she said quietly.

"Tifa." When he looked at her, his green eyes were sharp, tinged with worry, and a little dangerous. Just a little bit. "Tifa, why the hell are you drawing _him?_"

She took a deep breath, looking down at her hands, then sideways at the painting, thinking oddly to herself that Shagia looked almost real in the dim light, as if he were about to jump off the canvas and say, _Don't be alarmed. I can explain. I can explain everything._

"Garrod, there's something you should know."

_"They'll turn me to a bear sae grim,  
And then a lion bold-  
And last they'll turn me in your arms  
Into the burning gleed,  
Then throw me into well water,  
O throw me in with speed. _

"And then I'll be your ain true-love,  
I'll turn a naked knight,  
Then cover me wi your green mantle,  
And hide me out o sight."

He was angry. Tifa did not blame him for being angry; she knew he would be angry, and she did not try to stop him. But it still hurt when those brilliant green eyes bored into hers, and even if he did not have the habit of having his emotions written all over his face all the time, she still would have felt keenly the hurt and worry and anger that surrounded him like a fierce cloud.

"I can't believe you didn't tell me, Tifa. I can't believe you'd just let someone like him just walk in! You could have been hurt! Killed!"

"He doesn't remember anything," she protested, and he glared.

"That doesn't matter! How do you know? It might all be an act! They wanted to kill us, remember, kill us all! How do you know he won't follow you home one day, or just come into the shop in the morning when no one's around? It's not safe!"

"Garrod-"

"You can't trust him," he said, the words coming clipped and fast. He came toward her, gripped her forearm, shaking her slightly. "You can't trust him."

"I don't-"

"I won't lose you!" he said fiercely, and she felt him pull her into his chest with a speed that squeezed the breath from her chest, and she gasped for air. The anger in his sense was still there. It was making her dizzy. "I can't lose you again!"

"I'll always be with you, Garrod," she said softly, trying to twist in his grip so she could get some air. "Please, don't worry about me."

"How can I not worry?" he cried, pushing her to arms' length. His gaze raked over her face and she shivered. His eyes were wide, heated, almost alien. "I almost lost you so many times during the war, again and again and again! I swore to protect you, Tifa!"

"And you have," she told him quietly, prying his stiff fingers from her arms, rubbing at the numb rings that they left on her skin. "You have, so much. I love you so much, and I'm grateful for so much."

"Tifa," he began, and she stepped forward, laying one finger on his lips.

"And that's why I don't think you should stay here any longer."

He stared at her, shocked in the dim light. "What?"

"You should go," she said, gazing at him, the beloved face that was now as familiar to her as breathing, or as waking up in the morning with the sunlight on her face. "You don't belong here, and I am tying you down."

"You're not tying me down!" he exploded. "What the hell, Tifa! I was staying here for you, I'm staying here because I promised, I swore, that-"

"Listen to yourself, Garrod. You're staying here for me? Because you promised? That's no way to live."

"I'm not-"

She took one of his hands in his, feeling the pulse, the life in his wrist, loving how alive and passionate he was about everything that he did. It was one of the things that had made her fall in love with him, she, who had never been loved.

_But in the end, what is love, anyway?_

"I do not force you to understand what I see in Shagia Frost," she said quietly. "I know it is not enough for me to give you my word that he has changed. That he does not remember anything, and that he is quite happily living a new life as Garrod. But maybe it's better that there not be two Garrods in the same town - you were right. Your name is unique, too unique."

"I don't get it," he rasped. "Tifa, I thought you loved me. I thought we had a promise. I thought-"

She brought his hand to her lips, kissed his knuckles. "I do love you, Garrod. I love you too much to hold onto you for myself. I know you get up at night when the moon is full and stare out the window." She ignored the sudden tenseness of his muscles, ignored her heart when it screamed at her to stop, because this might mean she would lose him forever. "I know you are not quite happy here, that your journey is not quite finished. And no, the dreams do not tell me this. I don't dream of this in my dreams of the future, Garrod. I know this only because I know you, and I love you, and I want you to be happy."

"But I am happy," he mumbled. "I'm happy here."

"Are you?"

He didn't answer, pulling his hand out of hers violently and shoving both hands into the pockets of his pants, kicking at the floor. She waited, but he didn't speak.

"Shagia Frost taught me something," she said at last. "He, like you, is still searching. It was when I saw him that I recognized that I saw a little bit of me in him, but a little bit of you as well. He came to this town because his story is not yet over. He might not remember why, and he might not understand fully the need that drives him to search. But...the need is there. The need is there in your heart, too, Garrod."

He looked up past her head, to the window where the shutters were still open and the night sea breeze streamed in, a mix of chowder and salty air and the full moon's beams streaming down above the restless ocean. "There are times," he said at last, "when I wish you were not a Newtype."

She knew he did not want her to see as he turned his head away, but there was no missing the teardrop that balanced precariously, poised, at the edge of his eyelashes, then came tumbling down, leaving a silver streak on the pale skin of his cheek. At the corner of her eye, the painting of Shagia watched them both, a silent spectator, the only witness.

_I am just one man trying to find his path in the world, scarred by this war that was fought for some purpose which I don't understand._

"I told you," she said to Garrod. "I didn't realize this because I was a Newtype. I realized it because I love you."

_Gloomy, gloomy was the night,  
And eerie was the way,  
As fair Jenny in her green mantle  
To Miles Cross she did gae. _

First she let the black pass by,  
And syne she let the brown,  
But quickly she ran to the milk-white steed,  
And pu'd the rider down.

It took about three days for Garrod to pack the things he needed, to tell Witz that he was going on a trip and might not be back for sometime. The word _never_ was not mentioned, though Witz looked over Garrod's head at Tifa and saw it written in her eyes.

He didn't say where he was going, and Tifa did not ask. If he knew, he kept it to himself. His last three days at home were busy, full of packing and a lot of _Tifa, where is my pair of black pants that I bought last year?_ and _Tifa, I swear we had another toothbrush around here somewhere._

Neither of them mentioned Shagia Frost.

Toniya tried to reason with Tifa, and then when that did not work, she tried to reason with Garrod. She finally came back to Tifa, shaking her head. "I don't get it," she said. "You two confuse me to no end. Why on earth would you do this to him, Tifa?"

"It's what he wants," Tifa said, putting an arm around her friend and hugging her slightly. "Don't worry. I'll be fine. You should worry more about Witz and the baby than about me and Garrod. We'll be fine."

"I trust you," Toniya said, and the matter was not mentioned again, but she came over the night before Garrod left and gave him a nice going-away present, a pair of wool socks because it might be cold wherever he was headed.

Garrod did not try to argue with her again either. It was because she was right, Tifa knew, and both of them knew it. When at last the morning came and she saw him to the docks, made sure she had all his belongings, and kissed him one last time as he boarded the ship, it was with a great sense of finality, as if a chapter of her life had closed, but it was a good closing, and another would be beginning soon.

That was how life was.

"I love you, Tifa," he said, his last words to her before he let go of her hand, retreated up into the belly of the ship. "I'll come back. I pro-"

"No," she told him, stopping him. "Don't promise. I don't need a promise."

Garrod had stopped and his face had cleared, and when he smiled at her one last time, she knew he understood.

As the big bulk of the ship faded into the distance, she shook herself a little bit, noticing how bright and warm the sun was and realizing that winter at last had ended, and then made her way back to the shop, taking her time and walking lost in thought most of the way there. It was only as she put her hand to the door to turn the key in the lock that she realized that he was there, chair parked on the side of the wooden deck, watching her.

"Hello," he said.

"Hello," she responded, somehow not surprised. She almost said _Hello, Shagia_, but that would not have been right, so she simply unlocked the door and gave him a smile. "Would you like to come in?"

He followed her in, waiting until she had put down her usual basket and sketchpad on the counter, and then said, "I saw you down at the docks."

"Oh?" she questioned, again not surprised. It was as if he and she were both part of a script, and Garrod was part of it as well, and the scriptwriter had simply written down what had to be done and they were playing their parts, already predestined as to the ways they would go.

It was not like that, of course, but before the war, before Garrod, before D.O.M.E., she had believed that. That the future was set and there was nothing they could do to change that. But now she knew it was not like that. Sometimes it seemed like that, but the truth was that there was nothing predestined at all, and that, to her, was comforting.

"I saw you with that man. He's familiar too. I knew him, didn't I? The same way that I knew you..." His brow furrowed, and she smiled.

"His name is Garrod too."

A short stop in his sense again, and then everything came rushing in just a little bit too fast, and she saw the bewilderment in his face, but also the understanding, just a little bit, of why his wandering footsteps had taken him to this town by the sea.

"Is it now?" he said calmly, at last. "That's interesting."

They stared at each other again. His thoughts were very strong and his sense was bold, almost carefree. She wondered what it would have been like to have known him before, not as an enemy but as someone who he loved and who had loved him, because there had been someone like that once. Someone he still could not remember, but who had existed nonetheless.

There was no one like that for him in this town, but that was all right. That was not the essence of life, after all. Being with someone you loved was like coming home every night and knowing that the house you grew up in was there and always would be there, solid, abiding. But there was something about striking out for new horizons too, new destinations, knowing that there was something out there besides what you knew, knowing that you could not be happy until you found whatever that thing was.

"I wish you would tell me how it was that we met," he finally said. "It bothers me when I see you...whenever I see you. I know there is something I should know, but I don't. I don't like that."

She scooted herself onto the stool again, playing with the bristles of her paintbrush. Little flakes of dried paint misted over the counter. The sea breeze blew in again, rustling his hair. "Don't worry about that," she told him. "It's a beautiful day, isn't it?"

He grinned at last, shaking his head. "Whoever you are, I'm glad we met. Whether or not this is the first time."

She wondered where the ship would take Garrod. There were so many places they had never been, so many unexplored destinations in this new world of change. Maybe he would go visit Jamil. Jamil would be glad to see him. Jamil would understand, too.

"Come look. There's something I want to show you."

"A new painting?" he queried, wheeling his chair towards the counter, and she moved the canvas into the sunlight, where the paint shone fresh and bright.

"A new painting," she said, then stopped, thought. "A new painting, and a new beginning, too, I think. The next chapter of the story..."

_Sae weel she minded what he did say,  
And young Tam Lin did win,  
Syne covered him wi her green mantle,  
As blythe's a bird in spring _

Out then spak the Queen o Fairies,  
And an angry woman was she,  
"Shame betide her ill-far'd face,  
And an ill death may she die,  
For she's taen awa the bonniest knight  
In a' my companie.

**end part III**


	4. Quand La Lune est Haute

**After War Gundam X**

**Quand La Lune est Haute**

**[When the Moon is High]**

He cradled the man's heavy form in his arms, the dying man, his body riddled with bullet holes, and his heart felt like it would shatter from the weight of it all.

_Hang on_, he cried, the tears staining his cheeks, dripping onto the dying man's face, and the bullets were still coming, and he could not stop them.

A broken whisper, a sigh of breath, and he leaned over desperately, trying to catch the words coming from the ruined throat, under the crack of gunshots and screams of men dying, all dying, just like the man in his arms, and he wished he had never come here.

_Do not repeat the mistakes…of the past…_

But how could he hope to accomplish that? He was just a child, caught up in this senseless conflict engineered by adults who thought only of their own needs and selfish desires, and he did not want to be here any longer, wanted to go away, just away, to where there was no more war, no more killing, no more death.

_Gundam X…activate!_

**-sous les nuages de la nuit, je marche vers la clairière-**

_under the clouds of the night, i walk towards the clearing._

The rushing of the blue waves past the railings of the ship was a song. He clasped the cool steel bars with both hands, squinting his eyes against the salty wind, but all that he could see was waves and sky, and then more waves and more sky. Even the sight of a seabird would be welcome, but they were too far from land, and seabirds did not venture out where they could not find a resting place for the night.

Two weeks. It had been two weeks since he had left home, left the life he had known for the past two years, left a piece of his heart there with the girl who was the first girl he had ever loved and would probably be the only one.

_That's why I don't think you should stay here any longer_, Tifa had said, and Garrod could lie to himself and pretend that she was wrong. He could tell himself that she had betrayed his love for her, that she didn't understand him and that she did not want him anymore. He could even think, if he dared to go that far, that Shagia Frost had turned her against him, and that now she was trapped under his spell.

But he knew that was not true. Tifa was right, as always.

In the end, there were only three things that mattered: Tifa, the rest of the crew of the _Frieden_, and the moon. Tifa because he loved her, that much was obvious. The crew of the _Frieden_, for being the first and only friends he had ever known in this world when he had thought that friendship would never be something he would know. And then the moon.

He did not fear the moon, nor did he love it or hate it. But there were nights when he wished it would not hang in the sky like that, and when the moon was full and he would go to sleep with it burning cold and white outside the window, he would dream of the Gundam X and the satellite cannon, and somehow the light from the cannon and the light from the moon were one and the same, blurring together streaking towards him too fast for him to see, and he would hear the words incessantly in the background, Katokk's dying voice.

_Do not repeat the mistakes of the past...do not repeat…do not repeat…_

The ship from Durnham had docked at one of the bigger ports around the coast of old Italy a week ago, and Garrod had disembarked, wandered the town aimlessly all afternoon and ended up in one of the many bars lining the wharf area around early evening. He had not gotten drunk. In fact, he hadn't drunk anything at all, simply wanting to sit at the back of the bar and watch the patrons entering and leaving, listening to the rowdy, raucous conversation of drunken voices in the background, wanted to fade away into the woodwork until there was nothing left of him, and then maybe he could escape.

He had been brooding, staring at the dark stain spots on the table on which he was leaning, when he'd heard the word. There were certain words that made his hair stand on end, made him turn around involuntarily wherever they were spoken, and this was one of them.

"As long as they don't start a third war," the man two booths over proclaimed, "I don't care whatever the hell the New Federation does. None of my business. Them and their damn Newtypes."

"Newtypes didn't win the last war," someone else said quietly. "Men did. Men like you and me."

"They're all dead, anyway," the first man snorted, downing a huge mug of some vile-looking yellow liquid, sounding very pleased with himself. "All of them Newtypes…nothing more to worry about, hey."

Newtypes.

Garrod had sat very still, suddenly feeling conspicuous in spite of the fact that the corner he sat in was a dark one and he was wearing a blue jacket and black pants. Did it show on his face, he wondered, who he was? Did his eyes reflect the fact that he was not just another lowly traveler, that he had seen and faced things that no one should ever have faced? When people looked at him, did they see a seventeen-year-old boy, or did they see a man haunted by the specters of the past?

He would leave them all behind if he could, but it had been so long, and they seemed to want to stay.

_I know you get up at night when the moon is full…_

"Tifa," he mouthed silently, his eyes trained on the man who had uttered that word, who seemed entirely oblivious to the world and was downing yet another beer.

"Haven't changed a bit, have you," his companion chuckled, clapping him on the shoulder. Garrod winced as the other man nearly choked on his drink, coughing and spitting it all over the table. "Ah…shame I must leave so soon."

"Going back already?"

"Business is business," the second man said, and Garrod moved his intent gaze to him. He was an older man with graying hair and the beginnings of wrinkles on his face, looked at least somewhat sober, unlike his drinking companion, dressed all in flowing black with a golden earring in one ear and large golden rings on both hands. "I've got contacts waiting for me, and you know a deal's a deal. The new capital's no shabby place to be, either, I'll admit."

He was talking about the new Federation capital, Garrod realized. Witz had mentioned it some, and Jamil had written several letters to all of them over the course of the past two years, detailing construction of an Earth-based capital to where all the Federation government buildings would be moved. He sounded excited about it, but Garrod had never been too comfortable in large cities, and he hadn't thought he would be traveling again so soon.

Jamil.

The image came unbidden to his mind, the picture of the tall, silent man in the long blue coat, a man who he had at first hated and then grown to respect and later, almost to love as the father he'd never had. He wondered if Jamil had the answer, or at least some answers. Jamil had surely suffered the dreams too, a long time ago during the first war. If he was to ask Jamil, would Jamil listen?

_Do not repeat the mistakes of the past._

If he were to ask Jamil, and he listened, what would the former captain of the _Frieden_ say?

He narrowed his eyes at the second man, once again noting the choice of clothing, the earring in the man's right ear. As he watched, the man rose from his chair, and Garrod observed his movements, smooth and fluid, as if he was simply an extension of the bar's smoky air currents, floating like ghosts past him to the door.

Something clicked in his mind and he stood so quickly that he almost knocked his chair over. Grabbing his bag, he jostled his way through the crowd to the door that was still swinging slightly on its hinges, pushed through the entrance and into the cool night air outside.

The man was strolling away, turning down a small street to the left, and Garrod hesitated for just a moment, and then picked up his pace, hurrying silently after him. There had once been a time where he would have shouted out down the street, _stop! wait!_ not caring who was there to hear him, not realizing that sometimes, silence was an ally.

But that had been before the war.

The moon was bright, but it was not yet full, and he paid it no mind, keeping the man in his sights as the stranger made his way slowly but steadily through two alleyways and another side street. An afternoon excursion through the city might do the common pedestrian little good, but he had learned through long practice how to memorize his surroundings. The winding passages were leading towards the city's docks, Garrod knew, but he had yet to determine to which part of the docks the man was headed.

The man did not stop, did not alter his pace, and if he realized he was being followed, he was being surprisingly nonchalant about it. Garrod followed slowly but steadily, pausing in shadows of buildings and trash bins and crumbling stone steps as the surrounding city turned from storefronts to tired-looking two-and three-story buildings and then to boarded up windows, abandoned houses, heaps of garbage. Once or twice, Garrod thought he saw a rat scurry across the path in front of him.

There were a few times when he swore he heard waves, but the next turn was yet another alleyway, another side street. His shoulder was getting tired from where his pack was slung across it, and he debated with himself. Should he keep on? Should he turn back? What if he was wrong…?

And then just as he had promised himself that if the man did not emerge into some kind of open area within the next five minutes, he would turn back, the stranger stopped.

Garrod stopped too, melting into the shadows puddled at the side of a crumbling brick wall. Waited.

"All right," the man said, though he did not turn around, the words ringing loud and brassy in the silent alley. "Whoever you are who has been following me through the city, what do you want?"

"I need a ride," Garrod said, straightening and taking a step forward, out of the shadows. Just a single step. "I thought you might be able to give me one."

The man made a noise that might have been a chuckle. "You're a strange one," he said. "You followed me all the way here just to ask for a ride?"

"I knew I wouldn't find one any other way," Garrod said. "And I think I can trust you. I need a ride to the new Federation capital, and I heard you were going that way."

"They offer rides up at the other end of the harbor. Not too expensive. They'll get you to the capital faster, too."

"It's not about the money," Garrod said. "I wanted to ride with a friend. That's all."

He saw the man's shoulders stiffen in the blue moonlight. "And how do you know," he questioned, softly, silkily, his voice the edge of a knife-blade, "that I am a friend?"

"Because you're a Vulture," Garrod said. "And so am I."

**-d'un éclat argenté je la vois, la lune-**

_in a silver burst, i see her, the moon_

The man's name was Cryant d'Argent, a Vulture's name if Garrod had ever heard one, and he was the captain of the _Mirage_. He had heard of Jamil, of course, though he'd never met him, and had a great deal to say about the former _Frieden_ captain, most of which was good and some of which Garrod disagreed with but did not take offense to. Everyone had a right to their own opinions, and Jamil was not perfect.

None of them had been.

Cryant claimed he'd heard of Garrod too, through channels. It was the first battle against the Frost brothers that did it, he said, where the Vultures had come to Jamil's aid. Garrod winced a bit at the memory but did not comment. He was, instead, grateful that the battle had come to pass, because there was little dispute that Garrod was actually who he said he was, and Cryant had agreed to take him on as a passenger, provided he pulled his weight.

Cryant did not ask him what he was doing there or what he planned to do in the Federation city, though Garrod was sure he had guessed his desire to see Jamil again. But the captain was a true Vulture, providing Garrod with a room, three meals a day and the right to be left alone, and Garrod was grateful. Cryant himself was no great conversationalist, and when he did see the captain, it was usually on the ship's bridge or in the mess hall, where they would exchange pleasantries and perhaps one or two comments on the movements of the ship and other standard, safe topics. He was silent, like Jamil, but in a different way – calmer, looser, more nonchalant, but at the same time alert.

The _Mirage_ was, in most appearances, similar to the _Frieden_ in design, and for the first two days Garrod would wake up in the middle of the night with a weird sense of déjà vu, as if the past two years had never happened and he was still on the _Frieden_, and if he walked out of the room and down the hall, there would be Tifa's room and then the bridge where Toniya and Shingo and Sara were still working the controls through the night, and Jamil would be sitting in his captain's chair. Once or twice the feeling was so eerie and so strong that he would get out of bed, turn on the lights, and sit there with the window open listening to the pounding of the waves on the sides of the ship and the hiss of the ocean wind whipping through the window as the _Mirage_ cut through the dark waves almost silently.

He still did not quite understand why he had followed the Vulture, only that he had somehow known the man was a Vulture and that he had suddenly, there in the smoky bar, felt a fierce longing for the old days. The past could not be returned to, but he could pretend, and that was enough.

He helped out in the hangar during the day, welding and repairing parts, and when he was not in the hangar he was on the upper deck, leaning over the railing and watching the water flash by. Cryant's exec had asked him once why he stared so intently at the waves, to which Garrod had replied that he was watching for dolphins.

_There aren't any dolphins in these parts_, the exec had replied, sounding puzzled, and Garrod had shrugged.

_That's okay._

He got along well enough with the rest of the crew, and if they seemed just a little wary around him, it was understandable. Garrod remembered the life of a Vulture well enough – trust no one, answer to no one. Disobeying that creed had landed the _Frieden_ in trouble more than once, but then again, Jamil was no ordinary Vulture. Jamil had a big heart.

Was it better, Garrod wondered, to trust no one and live the rest of your life in solitude, or to have a big heart and know that you might be hurt for it, but trusting all the same?

He had not come to an answer, and today was the last day of the journey, the last day where he would be able to stand up on the deck and feel the ocean breeze in his hair and see the sun sparkling on the water, which, even though there were no dolphins, was just as blue and beautiful as it was the day he had seen Tifa dive in to swim with them. The thought of her squeezed his heart painfully, but he caught it, held it, not wanting to let the memory go so soon, even though it hurt him.

The waves rushed past, foaming whitecaps turning into rolling billows which were left behind in the ship's wake, which would soon turn to lapping tongues of water and then would subside once again to the rhythm of the sea. He sighed, turned to lean with his back against the railing. There was a black mass ahead – land, he thought – and he could faintly see the glint of sun on metal, the skyscrapers, most likely, of the capital's skyline.

"Garrod?"

He straightened, gave the _Mirage_ captain an easy grin as the man emerged up on deck, shielding his eyes with one hand to gaze out at the horizon. "Morning, Cryant."

The gold earring wavered a bit in the wind, and the captain lifted a hand in greeting. "You'll be leaving us shortly, won't you?"

Garrod gave him another grin. "As much as I'd love to hang around with you guys, yeah, I've got an errand or two to run, and it might take a while."

Cryant gave him an unreadable look, and Garrod frowned, but the captain did not say anything, simply made his way over to the railing and leaned his elbows against it, staring down into the water.

"As long as I've been doing this," he said, "I never get tired of looking down into the ocean. There's something new to see every time, something to discover."

Garrod stared past the bulky form of the man standing beside him, past the opposite railing, into the distance where there was no land, just an endless sea of sparkling blue in the morning sunlight. "I've been sitting for two years," he said, "pretending that I didn't want to see anything new. I thought I'd had my fill of traveling. I guess it took a kick to the head for me to realize I wasn't as happy as I thought I was."

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Cryant gave him a long, searching look. "I don't know you," the captain said finally, "and far be it from me to question why you chose to board my ship and why you're taking this journey. But I'd like to think I've seen my share of people in my days as a Vulture, and I'll say that you are a good man, Garrod Ran. Jamil was right to have chosen you."

Garrod smiled tightly. "Thanks. I'd like to think so too, though sometimes I don't know about that. Jamil saw something in me, I guess, and I owe him pretty much everything."

"Jamil," Cryant said, "is a better man than most. He puts me to shame, I know, but life is not about competing with the goodness of another. That would reduce everything to the misery of always trying to be better than the next man, and that is no way to live. All of us live and die, and all that's left to do before death is to do something that touches the lives of others."

"You're a good man too," Garrod said. "Better than most."

Cryant smiled. "I'm just doing my duty."

"There is someone I left behind," Garrod said slowly, not sure why he was telling the Vulture captain this, only that he needed to tell someone, and it felt right. "A girl who I love very much, who touched my life in the way you mean, I think, and I didn't realize it until too late."

Cryant's dark eyes offered no answers, but Garrod realized also that Cryant knew exactly who the girl was that he was talking about, and perhaps Cryant also knew a little bit more about the war and Newtypes and Jamil Neate than he had let on. But that was all right, because all Vultures had their own secrets.

"She'll understand," Cryant said, a rare smile crinkling the corners of his eyes. "I think you know that."

"How do you go on?" Garrod said suddenly, fumbling for the words, not quite sure even what he wanted to ask. "How do you…"

"Survive?"

Garrod supposed that was as good a word as any. He nodded slowly.

Cryant tapped one gloved finger against his chin, staring thoughtfully out to sea. "When I was young," he said at last, "just after the first war, it was difficult. It was difficult for everyone, but much more difficult for all of us who had been pilots in the war, who had nothing left."

For some reason, Garrod was not surprised. It was natural that Cryant should have been a pilot, just like Jamil had been a Newtype.

"The first year was the hardest. I would wake up in the middle of the night and see the moon shining outside my window, and I would be afraid." The Vulture captain turned to look at Garrod for an instant, before gazing back out to sea. "I hated the moon."

"I don't hate the moon," Garrod murmured, "but I don't love it, either." Turning his head to regard Cryant's profile against the side of the ship. "There's so much mysticism about the moon…so much that the moon represents, and yet whenever I look at it, I think of death."

"Jamil once told me," Cryant said softly, "that the hardest thing for a pilot to conquer is his apathy towards death. Because we, as pilots, don't think about killing. We sit in a protected cockpit, fighting others sitting in their own protective cockpits, and we never see our enemy's face. Death is a brief flash, an explosion, melted metal. It is not the sacrifice of a human life, but instead it is reduced to the destruction of technology."

Garrod hesitated, not sure how the question would be received. "Did you see the last battle? Were you there? With-"

"With Jamil?" Cryant smiled like a wolf. "Yes, I was there. I saw everything." One hand tightened on the metal railing. "It was only then I realized how much killing and how much death I had been responsible for as a pilot. I was just doing my duty, I thought."

"There's nothing wrong with doing your duty," he said desperately. "Is there?"

Cryant chuckled softly. "No. There is nothing wrong with that. It is only when that duty begins to consume you, begins to haunt you, that it's time to break away. I never broke away. I hung on to the very end, along with Jamil, along with all of those who could not admit that they had been wrong and that things had gone too far."

_Do not repeat the mistakes of the past._

"It's a new world, Garrod Ran. A new era, a new Federation, a new peace. Don't let anyone take that away."

"I- Garrod began, and Cryant stepped back.

"We should dock soon," he said, and Garrod knew the conversation was over as quickly and strangely as it had begun. He wanted to say something, to thank Cryant for trusting him, but the words stuck in his throat. It didn't seem appropriate to thank someone for something like that. It was something that should remain unsaid and simply felt, received from one soul to another.

The city was silver and black against the sky now, the hilly coastline resolving from dark landmass into green coastline, and the ship's whistle blew once, twice, three times, signaling pre-dock procedures initiated.

"I'd better go get my stuff," Garrod said instead. He pushed himself away from the railing, catching Cryant's gaze and holding it. "Thank you. For…the lift."

"One Vulture is always glad to help another," Cryant said. "We may never see each other again, and there are many things I still do not know, but good luck, Garrod Ran. And thank _you_."

**-elle porte les voiles de l'éternité-**

_she wears the veils of eternity_

It was almost noon when Garrod disembarked the Vulture ship and took the main road leading from the harbor into the city. He had been in only a few cities, but the capital was definitely unlike any other he had ever set foot in before. It was a city in the true sense of the word, from the steel and glass skyscrapers that formed the majority of the skyline to the hot rush of automobile traffic in the streets to the masses of pedestrians crowding the sidewalks. The sheer number of people here was staggering. The city had only been in existence for less than a year, and already it was larger than any city he'd ever been in.

It took a few false starts, three people from whom he asked directions, and a ragged city map, but all in all, finding his way to the capitol building was not that difficult. It did require him to ride the streetcar, which he had never done so and was a novel experience in itself. He hadn't been sure exactly what to do, so he'd imitated the old lady who had boarded the car before him, had accidentally dropped his money under the driver's seat, and spent about a minute, picking it up off the ground and apologizing to the irate passengers.

The capitol building was enormous, a monstrous construction of marble and limestone and brick and glass, and Garrod paused outside the massive gates with some trepidation, wondering if there was some policy against letting the common public into the grounds. But the gates were open, and the sign on the side proclaimed that public viewing hours were between 7 AM and 4 PM, and there didn't seem to be any policemen or guards around to say otherwise.

Taking a deep breath, he stepped inside.

A large modern sculpture of what looked like metal birds flying around some kind of silver globe graced the center of the capitol's courtyard, but there was no other decoration except the manicured lawns bordering the white stone pathways leading to the main building. There were other visitors, Garrod saw, families, couples strolling hand in hand, people posing for pictures, little children running along the grass to be picked up by scolding parents.

If he tried hard enough, he could almost pretend the war had never happened.

He forced himself to keep walking, watching the stone steps leading up to the capitol's main entrance grow steadily nearer. The building seemed even more imposing, great and frightening and larger than life, glowing white in the sunlight with its sharp, crisp corners and delicate sculpture work, and Garrod felt his heartbeat speed up.

Jamil probably wasn't even there. Maybe Jamil worked somewhere else, or maybe he wasn't even on Earth. He might be up in space in the colonies. Besides, who would listen to him, a mere boy who had nothing to do with the Federation government?

He had thought he could just walk up to the door and say he wanted to see Jamil, and they would let him in. Now, he realized it might not be that easy.

_What am I doing here?_

His feet were like lead and the pack on his shoulder seemed like the weight of the world, and he would have stopped walking if he could. But he could not, simply watched, felt like a spectator in his own body as his feet carried him closer and closer, and then he was taking the steps up, one at a time, toddling forward into the shadow of the great entrance, and the doors stood open.

He stopped.

NO VISITORS BEYOND THIS POINT, the sign read, a few meters from where he was standing, and beyond the rope barrier that prohibited entrance, the entrance hall stretched out grand and vast, like a palace, Garrod thought. He craned his neck to look up at the ceiling and felt dizzy. An enormous skylight spanned most of the length of the hall, and the beams of sun were warm on his neck and his back, but he felt cold.

_I shouldn't have come_, he thought, and somewhere in the back of his mind, a weird little laugh began to worm its way up between the threads of his consciousness, sniggering at the back of his throat and threatening to burst out from between his lips. He clamped his mouth shut and gritted his teeth, wondering if he should just go back the way he had come, back to the _Mirage_, and ask Cryant for help. He doubted the Vulture captain could get far, but at least Cryant had connections, unlike Garrod, who was just a nameless boy in the shadow of the great cogs of the governmental machine.

_I was the pilot of the Gundam X_, he imagined himself saying, imagined himself bursting into the assembly hall, _and I need to see Jamil Neate._

"Sir? Sir?"

With a start, he looked down, realized he was leaning against the rope barrier, had somehow made his way across the floor and was reaching forward as if trying to catch something in his hand. The rope barrier tensed under his weight, and he tried to step back, but his balance was off, and before he had even fully realized what was happening, he was toppling forward, taking the barrier with him, hitting the ground with a thud and a flash of white pain and the crash that was the sound of the sign hitting the floor next to him.

"Sir? Are you all right?"

Garrod grunted.

Hands turned him over and he blinked the stars out of his eyes, finding himself staring directly into the sunlight streaming down from the skylight, and he groaned, gave his head a shake. There would be a bump on his head by this evening for sure.  
"Can you hear me, sir?"

A face came into view, a pretty girl, dressed in a uniform with a blue nametag that read SHERRY. Garrod attempted to flash a smile and wasn't sure how well he succeeded, as the pretty girl did not smile back, simply sat back on her heels and stared at him.

"Uh…" he said. "Sorry."

"Need a hand sir?" she said, and he winced, nodded and took her outstretched hand, pulled himself back up. He glanced ruefully at the sign, but she was already kneeling down, picking it off the ground and replacing it, straightening the rope barrier.

"Can you-" he began, but she looked back at him and smiled a polite smile.

"I'm sorry sir, but there are no visitors allowed in the actual building itself. You'll have to leave, I'm afraid."

He clutched his pack, feeling rather desperate, and he figured there was no real way he could embarrass himself further in front of her anyway.

"I need to see Jamil Neate," he burst out.

She frowned at him. "Do you have an appointment?"

"No, but I-"

"You'll have to leave," she said again firmly. "Thank you for coming."

"No!" he shouted, wrenching his arm free as she tried to take it and tow him back across the line. "Wait I-"

"Sir, please!"

"You don't understand!" he pleaded, trying unsuccessfully to halt her pushing of him towards the door. "You don't-"

There was the sound of a door opening, boots clicking on the marble floor, and then a man's voice.

"What is the commotion out here?"

The pretty girl let go of him so hurriedly that Garrod yelped, tried to regain his balance, failed, and crashed to the ground yet a second time, managing to avoid bumping his head this time, but landing no more gracefully as the top of his pack came undone and the contents of it came spilling, scattering over the floor.

"I'm sorry sir," the girl gasped, and Garrod was amazed at the change in her voice from bossy to almost simpering, and he rolled his eyes. "But this man was trying to come in, and there are no visitors allowed, so I-"

"Be a little quieter about it," the man admonished, and Garrod, who was in the process of picking himself up from the floor, with a compass in his hand that had formerly belonged inside his pack, froze.

The compass fell from his hand with a metallic clang, rolling unsteadily across two tiles before it stopped.

"It can't be," he whispered, and slowly, almost afraid of what he would see, he brought his head up, towards where the man was standing, holding a sheaf of papers in his hand. "It can't be. You're dead."

There was a slight hiccup in time, as if everything suddenly stopped, and then with a jerk, it started again, and the papers fluttered to the ground from a suddenly limp hand, wafting gently downward like leaves in the wind.

_A new era, a new Federation, a new peace. Don't let anyone take that away._

"…Garrod Ran?"

The man was Olba Frost.

**-son auréole embrasse les étoiles-**

_her halo embraces the stars_

_You can't understand the pain of those who were not needed!_

_ You are just selfish!_ he cried. _Selfish! That's the most selfish reason I've ever heard!_

The moon was as large as the world, dazzling with a light that froze the blood and made the tears start to his eyes, but there was nothing else he could do as he brought the gun up to the monsters streaking through empty space, because they wanted to kill him, and it was either kill or be killed.

He did not want to kill anymore.

And then he fired, and the blue light was the arrow of truth against the backdrop of the screaming moon, screaming and bleeding and dying, everything was dying, and then there was silence.


	5. The Crystal Mirror

After War Gundam X: Caris Nautilis  
The Bronze Labyrinth, Part V

_Gundam X and characters are property of Takamatsu Shinji, Sotsu Agency, Bandai, Sunrise and TV Asahi. "Merlin" copyright 1953 to Edwin Muir, and "The Lady of Shallott" copyright 1833 to Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Please do not repost without permission._

* * *

**After War Gundam X  
The Crystal Mirror**

--------------------------  
_O Merlin in your crystal cave / Deep in the diamond of the day,  
Will there ever be a singer / Whose music will smooth away  
The furrow drawn by Adam's finger / Across the memory and the wave?  
_--------------------------

He could see that Olba was not happy.

The other man hid it well. Olba never voiced any complaints, and on the surface, he seemed as happy as anyone in his position and circumstances could ever want to be. But Caris knew.

He did not attribute this knowing to any sort of Newtype powers, though sometimes he thought it might be a bit of that creeping in. But more than anything, it was because he had somehow developed a very good people sense in the latter half of the war. It was in the things Olba did, the little things, such as sitting for hours at a time staring at the goldfish pond in the backyard, or muttering things under his breath when he thought Caris wasn't listening. It was the way he spent hours in the library, just staring at the wall. Olba loved to read, and when he could walk into the library, lock the door, and come out four hours later and proclaim that he never finished a single page, it didn't take a Newtype to realize something was not right.

But Caris never told Olba. It was not something that the two of them would ever bring up to each other, and he knew that it was mutual, that Olba also somehow knew that he was hurting on the days his Synapse Syndrome would flare up, that the reason Caris slept in so late on those days was not that he hadn't gotten enough sleep the night before. But likewise, Olba would accept Caris' explanation with a smile and a nod and just say that they'd gotten some information from Headquarters the night before, and since Caris had gone to bed early, Olba had done him a favor and started indexing it.

And Caris would smile through the pain, fight it down, and say, _thank you, Olba._

The war was over, but some memories were too close still for words.

Things two years after the war were not much different from things a month after the war, a year after the war. Jamil hadn't said much when Caris had walked into the capitol building one morning with a bag on his shoulder, a box of papers under his arm, and Olba Frost beside him. The former Frieden captain did not, in fact, say anything at all about this unexpected development; he had simply held out his hand for Caris' papers, greeted him, then looked at Olba and asked if Olba Frost would like a job in the History Department.

_I suppose I should have been shocked that he'd do something like that_, Olba had told Caris later when they were home. _But I'm getting used to you and your friends. If I were Jamil Neate, I would have shot me on the spot. I hurt him most of all, during the war._

And Caris had given him a shadowy smile, and said, _well, the war is over._

Jamil had given him this job of war historian, because, he said, he needed someone who he could trust. He needed facts, unbiased stories, the entire gory truth, and most historians had the unfortunate tendency to distort that truth, to glorify the victor and villainize the defeated, and he would have none of that while he was the leader of the Federation.

Jamil wanted the truth, and Caris would give it to him.

Days passed into nights passing into weeks and months, and the stacks of paper grew thicker and taller, and the library grew messier and messier. Olba was the research guru, putting his love of books and knowledge of Caris' libraries to good use, digging up the oddest, most obscure facts that somehow fit perfectly into their account of the war. And then Caris would be the one who would make the trips out to the capital, the one who met with Jamil to do their weekly reports, because Olba was still nervous about being in the same room with the man who he had betrayed during the war and then tried to kill over and over again.

He hesitated to say that the two of them were best friends. Friends, they were, and it would have been impossible for them, living in the same house, to not become close as time went on. Caris had never been close to another human being before, but neither had Olba, having lived in his brother's shadow for so long, and so it was trial and error for both of them. There were arguments, but those were rare - mostly the days flew past in a sort of wary attachment that gave way to cautious friendship, which then morphed into something neither of them could name, a feeling that Caris thought sometimes was what it would have been like to have a brother.

It was not that he was a replacement for Shagia. No one could ever be that. But Olba's unspoken communication in gesture and expression spoke louder than any words, affirmed that Caris had become someone important to him, just as Olba had become someone important in Caris' life.

But as always, neither of them brought that up in conversation either, because there were some feelings, also, that were too close for words.

They were both historians now, the ones dedicated to chronicling the truth of the war and what had happened therein, of the death and destruction and the myth of the Newtype unraveled. But the farther Caris got with his projects, the more he tried to quantify things and make himself the unbiased judge of things that had occurred, he found that he could not, because too much had happened and too many people had died.

It was almost nine months after the war, almost that long since Caris had started this project and Olba had then joined him, when Caris came home from the capital with a request.

"It's really not a request from Jamil," he explained to Olba over the dinner table, as the other man sipped a mug of coffee and looked quizzically as him, unruly black hair slipping over one eye. Olba's hair had grown long since he had come here, but he had refused to cut it. "I just thought of the idea on the way home."

"Spit it out," Olba said, arching one eyebrow at him the way he always did when he was faintly annoyed.

Caris hesitated. "It's rather personal though."

Olba laughed. "What isn't? This is about the war - it's all personal. Tell me. I won't try and stab you again, I promise."

The lights in the room seemed to dim just a bit, and Caris leaned closer, as if someone might overhear. "Would you be willing to...write an account of the war...from your perspective?"

Olba went very still. One of the logs popped in the fireplace, sending up a shower of sparks.

"From the perspective of the New Federation, really," he amended hastily, wanting to fill the suddenly awkward silence with something, idle chatter, some sort of explanation, anything. "I just thought...well, it's not a true history if only written by the victor, is it? That's how I feel, anyway. The world might think differently...but I think you should have a chance to tell your story, too..."

The candles on the table flickered, and Caris laid his hands flat on the shining mahogany surface, noting idly that he needed to cut his fingernails, that the skin around the cuticle of his right thumb was broken and cracking. Talking with your hands in plain view was a sign of honesty, Nomoa had explained to him, because that then signified that you had nothing to hide.

Ironic that it had been Nomoa.

"I'm sorry," Caris said finally, heavily. "It was presumptuous of me to assume you would be ready to-"

Olba's eyes were black, deep, unreadable. "He died, Caris."

There was no need to ask who _he_ was. Caris twisted his fingers together on the table. "I know. Forget that I had ever mentioned it. "

"No. I'll do it."

"Olba-"

"He deserves..." Olba's voice faded into a whisper. "He deserves some sort of..."

"...tribute?" Caris questioned, wondering what exactly Olba meant.

Olba shook his head. "No, not tribute. We were wrong, you know, and I think I knew that we were wrong during the war, too, everything we did and everything we were. But it never occurred to me that we could be wrong, when he was so...right. I trusted him, and he never let me down, even if we were wrong. Even if we did the wrong thing."

"What then," Caris said, "if not a tribute? Shagia will go down in history as a villain, as a murderer, as someone whose own selfish ends merited his own death. You need to refute that."

Olba shook his head. "I can't."

Caris frowned. "Why not?"

"Because he was all those things. We were all those things - villains, murderers, selfish..." Olba gave him a slight, regretful smile. "Mankind is a selfish creature. I will not rewrite history to reflect something that wasn't, because I pride myself on being a historian." He looked down at his empty plate, down at the cup of coffee between his hands. "But I think your idea has some merit. Exorcise the ghosts, and so on and so forth." Glancing quickly at Caris. "Unless, of course, you don't want this to be something like that. I don't have to."

"I wouldn't have asked you if I didn't think you would do a good job," Caris said, picking up his own cup of coffee. The mood seemed to have broken, settled like the sparks of the fire into nothing, scattered and harmless now, and they drank their coffee in companionable silence, and Caris mulled over the events that had brought things to this, and wondered what would have happened if Shagia had survived.

At the least, Olba would not be here with him now, sitting there in his chair, comfortable and looking like he had always belonged there, like an extension of himself.

"Thank you," Olba said finally.

Caris leaned back in his chair, staring at the ornately carved ceiling. "Thank you. I wish I could have known your brother."

"No you don't," Olba said, laughed, and then subsided. "He was not a good person," he said softly. "But...I loved him all the same."

--------------------------

Olba made rapid progress on his project, though whenever Caris asked to read it, he would refuse, saying that it wasn't finished yet, and even if it was finished, there were revisions and things he would have to do before it was fit for human consumption. Caris only asked once or twice, and then realized that Olba was set in his resolve, and the excuses were just things he said because he did not anyone else to read his words. So he stopped asking.

He'd given Olba a computer for this purpose, but it sat unused in a corner of the other's room, next to the stacks of manuscript paper and ink pens that were obviously the materials of choice. Perhaps pen and paper had a special significance too; Caris did not know, and he didn't ask about that, either.

As the months crept by, it became more and more obvious to Caris that this project carried far more emotional connotations and side effects than he had expected. He didn't know how he had overlooked it, or somehow missed it, or perhaps because Olba had been so willing to start writing this, he had assumed that those memories of the war had settled at least somewhat and were safe to touch. It was around this time that Caris realized that Olba was not happy, would never be happy even staying in this house and having all the luxuries in the world and having the privilege of a new life after the end of the war.

He didn't want to accept that, but even if he denied it, he knew it was the truth.

Jamil had said this day would come, on one of the trips he had taken down to the capital, and he hadn't quite believed the former captain, had told him that Olba was perfectly happy now, and it would be foolish to interrupt the flow of his new life.

_But to him_, Jamil had said, _the war is not over. The war will never be over because for him, there was no resolution._

_I don't understand_, Caris said, and Jamil had folded his hands and smiled sadly.

_You might more than you think. At least you are happy now in what you do...but when it comes time for Olba to leave, do not try to delay him. You will only hurt both you and him in doing so._

It was only after Caris had returned home that he realized, in all the conversations the two of them had had about the war since Olba had come to live with him, Olba had never once talked about his brother.

It was that second spring after the war that Olba began to bring up, casually, slipping it into conversations and idle chatter, the topic of moving to the capital. It was a little forced at first, but with a note of urgency, and Caris took it in stride, not encouraging or discouraging him, just wondering what exactly it was that was moving Olba in that direction when all that he had known was here. There was a feeling nagging at him whenever Olba spoke the word "capital," a feeling that bothered him because he could not define it, but only knew that it was uncomfortable and he didn't like it.

It was a few weeks later that Caris finally realized it was jealousy.

He couldn't accept that, at first. Jealous of what? A city?

He was lying in bed one night when the answer hit him - that he was jealous not of Olba's restlessness, nor of Olba's memories, but simply of the fact that Olba had restlessness and memories and he did not. The Caris Nautlius before Nomoa had been a nobody, the Caris Nautilus during Nomoa had been someone who he was ashamed to even acknowledge now, and the Caris Nautlius after Nomoa was a man without a home, without anyone to love. Olba had had Shagia, but Caris had nobody.

The only other person in Caris' life was Olba, and he did not want Olba to go.

Olba was in town on some errand on that afternoon when Caris was in the study alone going through some papers, and he happened to glance to the side as he was preparing to leave, saw Olba's bulky manuscript sitting there. Two pages of it were laid out on the table separate from the rest, with an old-fashioned fountain pen rolled carelessly on one corner, as if they had just been written and were sitting out to dry.

Caris took one step to the door, looked back at the papers. Stopped.

It was as if his feet were moving of their own accord, his hands placing his own papers back on the table and mechanically touching the fine sheet with Olba's flowing script seeped into the fibers, bringing it to reading level, fingers shaking slightly. The sun was slanting through the large windows, a tinge of gold on white.

_...and the world will remember Shagia Frost as a murderer and a traitor, but I can only remember him as that touch in my mind, the voice in my head. I lived with that for so long that it is difficult even now to bear it. Many days I wake up alone in the middle of the night and feel deep inside that something is missing. It tears at my heart. It is like a terrible gash right through my soul that will never be taken away, but I will have to live with it for the rest of my life. _

_My brother told me we were special. And he was right. We were special. What my brother did not tell me was that we were not the only ones who were special, because that word means so many different things that I never knew. Every single human being on this planet is born with some talent, some gift that no other person has, and for one person or a pair of people to single themselves out as special, as naturally superior, has no purpose. _

_The Newtypes and those who used them understood that in the end. We, however, did not. _

_I suppose that the burden I bear now is fitting penance for what I have done, though maybe there is nothing in this world that can erase my sins. My brother is dead, and maybe even that is not enough. I believed in the concept of vengeance until he disappeared from my life, and I think that vengeance has been served. I think that justice has been done as much as it is able to be. _

_I don't regret that, because I loved him._

"I wondered when you'd find your way into my things."

He straightened with the page in his hand, closing his eyes against the dazzling sun. "I felt you when you came in the door."

"I know. I am not that arrogant, to think that I can surprise a Newtype like that."

He didn't turn to face Olba, didn't need to. When he touched the other's mind, he could feel a raw, chaotic spot, the only sign that remained of the mental link that had been severed when Shagia died, and then the emotions around the link - no anger, only regret, resolve, sadness.

"When are you leaving?" Caris said.

Olba shifted. "Tomorrow. I was in town buying a train ticket. I leave in the morning. I was hoping to tell you tonight after dinner."

"Now is fine."

"I'm sorry," Olba said. "After all you've done, and especially the memories I have made here. It is not that I don't want to stay, but I need to go."

"I understand," Caris said. "You do what you have to."

"You come to the capital every week anyway, almost," Olba offered, and Caris felt the tentative hope for a little resolution, trying to give him some hope, and he shook his head.

"I do come to the capital every week. But me going to see you there would defeat the purpose, wouldn't it?"

"I'm sorry," Olba said again.

Caris smiled tightly. "There's nothing to be sorry about. You do what you want."

He knew that Olba had felt the raw pain in his voice, had hoped that the other man would say that he had changed his mind, had been wrong and had decided to stay here instead, but knew at the same time that he would not. That they would part not quite as friends, but nothing he could say would stop Olba from going.

Mankind was, in the end, a selfish creature.

"Fine," Olba said. "I will. Goodbye, Caris."

That night, Caris dreamed that he was standing on a pier overlooking a wharf of fishing boats, feeling the sea-spray in his hair and breathing in the crisp, salty air as seagulls wheeled overhead. There was something or someone terribly important close by, but all the streetlamps were dark, and he knew that the city was empty.

--------------------------

Olba left the next day, as he had said, and the big house seemed very empty and dark with him gone. There were the servants, of course, and the occasional visitor from the capital who would bring him reports and critiques and documents, and the occasional word from Jamil. Caris did not ask about Olba, but one day a month later, the assistant director of the museum showed up at Caris' door with a stack of reports, a box of candy from one of the secretaries, who Caris was certain he'd never met, and a letter.

Caris had opened the letter later that night when the assistant director had been pacified with one of the luxurious guest bedrooms, had lit a candle and read it in the near-dark. He already knew who it was from, though the envelope had been blank.

_Dear Caris,_

_Life is busy here. I arrived on schedule here and am just settling in. I have, to my surprise, been on good terms with Jamil Neate and gotten a job in the History Department in the capitol building, just as he promised me when I went to see him with you that time._

_My portion of the war history is almost ready, though I think I have a few more edits. I still have shown it to nobody but you. You and I both know that your reading of it in the study that day was no accident, so let's not pretend._

_There was a reason I wanted you to see that page most of all, because I think that living with you taught me, above all things, that there was hope even for the most hardened criminal, the worst man alive. I wanted to kill myself when I woke up in that hospital bed, and sometimes I look back and see how far I have come._

_I regret hurting you this way, but there is a specific reason that I had to get out of that house and away from you. As long as I stayed there with you and lived the life that you've chosen, I would never find my own path. You showed me the way that I should go, but I don't want you to become another Shagia Frost, someone for me to cling to. I want to be my own man._

_I don't think I am ready to see you yet, but when I am, I will send you another notice, and you can come down to visit and we can reminisce about the old times._

_Olba_

It did not surprise him that Olba had chosen the historian's profession, because he and Olba were alike. Both of them had been led astray during the war by people they had loved, and both of them were now too jaded and too wary to let anyone else dictate the way of things. History was something solid, something set, something that could not be changed, because who could change the past?

He stayed up late that night, sitting at his desk and writing letter after letter, getting halfway through each before deciding that something he had written was not right, that this or that did not need to be said, and crumpling them up and throwing them in the trash. Finally, he went to bed exhausted, with nothing written, not even a single line. The next morning, the museum director asked if he had any return correspondence for anyone at the capital, and Caris simply shook his head.

He dreamed again, the next night, of the same wharf and the same city, and this time he noticed that just above the pier on which he stood was a small building, what looked like a store or a shop, painted blue with a red roof. There were trinkets and knick-knacks displayed in the windows, and he was curious despite himself, found himself stepping off the pier and onto the ramp leading to the door.

When he raised one hand to the door handle, the door drew open in front of him, and he hesitated, then stepped inside.

"Hello, Caris."

"Tifa," he returned, not too surprised to find her here in his dream, because it was, after all, Newtype to Newtype. She looked the same as she had two years ago except that her face was a little less round, and her figure had filled out a bit, but her eyes were still soft, vague, her hair the same wispy brown. She had always reminded him of a little bird, fragile and ready to flit away at the slightest touch.

She smiled at him with that secret smile, and he waited, feeling that the dream would end if he made any kind of movement, so he stood very still. It was only then that he noticed the figure of a dark-haired man to her right, sitting in some kind of strange wheeled chair, one hand holding a brush raised to the canvas in front of him, painting with bold, straight lines over and over in a vivid crimson red that dripped down the white background like blood.

Caris looked back at her, and she gazed at him, folding her little hands in front of him, serene, a little girl who was yet a queen among queens, and she spoke into his mind.

_You know._

The man turned his head.

He awoke with a start, panting softly, sitting bolt upright in bed and putting a hand to his eyes where the image of Shagia Frost's pale, upturned face till burned.

--------------------------  
_Or a runner who'll outrun / Man's long shadow driving on,  
Break through the gate of history / And hang the apple on the tree?  
_--------------------------

It was only natural that the post should bring another letter from Olba the next week.

_Dear Caris,_

_My manuscript is finally finished. I think I will send it off to the printers tomorrow...I was going to have some of the other staff look it over, but after thinking about it more, I decided it would be better if it was simply typeset and printed without any sort of editor. It's a very private matter to me, and Jamil understands. After it's all done and bound, I will send you a copy so you can be the first person to read it in entirety._

_In more unsettling news, Garrod Ran is here in the city. I ran into him in the capitol building last week, where he was, unsurprisingly enough, trying to break in. He recognized me, and again I was surprised he did not try to kill me on the spot. In fact, he was more shocked than anything else, though I don't think it was at the fact that I was alive, which still baffles me, since that last shot from the Gundam Double X's cannon should have annihilated my Gundam the same way it did my brother's._

_We are walking wary circles around each other at the moment. Neither of us has brought up anything more significant than the usual 'good morning' or 'have a nice day,' but I have a feeling it will come to a head soon. Jamil rescued him and he is filling in very nicely as one of the security guards for the building while we wrack our brains trying to think of a job for him. He is not being particularly helpful in that regard._

_They are building a new history building and library here across the street from the main capitol building, and when they are done, my office will be moving there. I'm sure you've seen the construction if you've been to the city recently. I will write you with the new address if you'd like, or you can find out from Jamil._

_Spring is beautiful here. The trees and flowers are blooming and preparing for summer, and every day I wake up and look out the window and realize I am lucky to be alive._

_Take care._

It was signed, this time, with a simple "O".

_Olba, your brother is alive._

He was sorely tempted to pull out a sheet of paper, scrawl that, and mail it off in the post, but he twisted his fingers together to stop them from shaking, knew he could not do that no matter how sore he was at Olba's departure.

Caris had no doubt that Shagia was indeed alive, just as he had no doubt that Tifa Adil had tried to reach him that night in her dream and had somehow succeeded. Whether or not that had been a real image or something created in her own mind, that he did not know, but that didn't matter anyway.

_The war will never be over because for him, there was no resolution._

If Shagia was alive, then all that Olba had done, all that he had written...wouldn't that be rendered useless? History could not be changed - that was the way of the world, the truth that Caris had known, and the truth of Olba's existence was that his brother was dead.

And if Shagia was not dead, then what of the broken connection in Olba's mind that Caris touched whenever the two of them spoke?

Olba had all but given him a blatant invitation to write him back, and he could write to Olba, but what then? How could he tell someone that the life he had lived for the past two years was based on a falsehood, that the reason he was hurting was not because the person he loved was dead, but because the person he had loved was no longer that person?

The gnawing jealousy mumbled something too, but he ignored it.

_You know_, Tifa had said.

Garrod was in the capital.

Shagia Frost was alive.

Caris pushed his hands against the heavy oak table, stood, squeezing his eyes shut against the morning sun, and decided in that moment to do absolutely nothing, one way or the other, because it was not his place, his story.

It was a rewriting of history to do anything about it, and that was the one thing he would not do, because it would hurt Shagia, would hurt Olba, but would hurt himself most of all, and he, like Olba, was selfish.

Spring turned into summer and the shrubs and trees outside in the garden grew shiny, rich, emerald-green leaves, and Caris took to taking long walks outside the gates of the house in the evening, where the unspoiled wilderness of young, virgin trees and the smell of musty soil and growing things cleared his head in a way that all the luxury of his old house could not.

He had not received a letter from Olba in over a month, and many times he would tell himself that he didn't care, that if Olba was going to sever all ties with him, that was the best way. He knew that he was lying to himself, but he really didn't care, either.

His favorite trail was one that led to the top of a hill about thirty minutes from the house, set deep through the ocean of trees that were not quite old enough to be called a forest but taller than those found in just simple woods. It was a dirt trail that looked like it had been made by some animal - deer, perhaps - and he would walk it in the evenings after an early supper and make it to the top of the grassy knoll just as the sun would set behind twin peaks of the distant mountains like a messy watercolor painting and the first pinpricks of silver stars could be seen.

It was two months after Olba's last letter and after the dream with Tifa, and he was sprawled on the grass on top of the hill watching the last rays of the sun disappear behind the mountains, and he suddenly became aware of the moon rising, of the quality of the light changing from rough, powerful reds and oranges to a whisper of blue and gray and glimmering silver sparkle.

_The war will never be over because for him, there was no resolution._

It was not fair of him to miss Olba, he decided wearily, staring up at the moon, because Olba did not miss him. He saw Garrod's face in front of his eyes silhouetted against the moon, saw the gleaming laser beam descending from heaven like the light of God.

Who was he, just a simple human, to judge the actions of others? History was full of the accounts of those who had tried, and in the end, nothing was changed.

And yet, history said that the war was over, but was it really over?

He gazed into the sky, like a daydream, and felt her shadow falling over him, and he breathed in deep the smell of the sleeping forest.

_It isn't over for you yet either_, said Tifa Adil, and Caris saw her kneeling beside him, crouched barefoot in the grass and shining faintly, transparent against the trees and the mountains and her voice was like rushing water. One cool hand rested on his forehead, and he protested weakly, but she just smiled.

_Come to Durnham. I will be waiting for you._

"Why?" he said.

_For you, also, it is time for the war to end._

When he opened his eyes, the moon was high overhead and there were crickets chirping by his ear, and when he rolled over on muscles that were sore from falling asleep on the bumpy ground of the hilltop, the grass next to the hollow where he had lain was indented flat, in the shape of two footprints.

--------------------------

Durnham was a fishing village on the edge of the water on what had once been France, and it had been almost impossible to find. It was too small for the maps, too new for the libraries, and he had finally dived into the internet and found a mention of it on one small website advertising fishing nets.

He discovered that getting there was almost as big a hassle as trying to find it, and ended up buying three train tickets - one to Triumphe, the largest city in the region, then one to another, smaller, town that was the hub for the only train line that passed through Durnham itself.

It was on his way home from town the last evening before his departure, where he had been to buy himself some new socks and underwear and deodorant and all the toiletries that one required before any long trip, when he just happened to check the post on the way in and there was another letter, thin and flimsy just like the others had been with no return address, but when he opened it, there was just one line.

_I have to leave the capital. I can't say when I'll be back. Maybe some day I can explain. _

It was not signed.

Caris had a fairly good idea of where Olba was going, because he had met Garrod Ran at the capital and Garrod would not stray far from Tifa for very long. He did not sleep well that night, though he could not remember any dreams, and boarded the train next day with two bags and slept through most of the ride to Triumphe. The train station at Triumphe was large and confusing, and he barely made it to his next train in time. He slept most of the way there too, waking when the train jolted restlessly over the tracks and pulled into the tiny station where he would make his last transfer to the line for Durnham. The weather had turned cloudy in the early afternoon, and as he boarded the 4 PM train, it began to rain.

He did not want to see Olba again so soon. It would be awkward, especially in Shagia's presence, because if Olba was reunited with his brother, Caris would be just another shadowy person off to the side, insignificant now in Olba's world.

He thought of the tide of history, flowing onward, stopping for no creature and nothing, not even for kings, not even for Newtypes, and especially not for any of them. If he could stop time, he thought fiercely to himself, clenching his fist in his lap, staring down at it and hearing the pitter patter of the rain on the window in the back of his mind, he would make sure none of this - the war, anything - had ever happened.

_Attention, ladies and gentlemen_ (the intercom announced, and Caris jumped). _We are now approaching Durnham Station. Please make sure you have all your belongings before disembarking._

Caris got up listlessly, pulled his two suitcases off the baggage rack, and ambled his way toward the door. There was no one to meet him as the train doors opened, only the gray rain from the gray sky on the gray concrete. He could feel the spray of it splatter his face and clothing slightly as the wind shivered and flung the water droplets from side to side under the station overhang.

"Tifa Adil's house, please," he said to the taxi waiting outside the station, and the driver did not ask for clarification, simply nodded and started the engine. It was one of those villages, then, the ones he had only read about in storybooks, where the town was small enough that everyone knew everyone else.

The taxi stopped in front of a one-story brick house enclosed by a wooden fence and a wrought iron gate, small and rustic and overall exactly what Caris would expect of Tifa. Maybe not of Garrod, but definitely of Tifa. He paid the driver and got out of the car, but as the taxi sped away, he could not bring himself to open the gate, just stood there on the wet sidewalk, drenched in the rain which had now become nothing short of a downpour, suitcases in hand, wondering if it was not too late to turn back.

_For you, also..._

The front door of the house opened and someone was coming down the steps, and Caris could not see who it was through the rain, but even if he had his eyes closed and it had been the dead of night with no moon, no stars, no light at all, he would know who it was that was now unlocking the gate and swinging it open.

"I knew you would come," Olba said.

--------------------------

"I've been looking out the window every five minutes since I got here," he confessed later after Caris had dried his sopping wet hair and changed into dry clothes and was seated at the kitchen table drinking some hot tea. "Garrod kept asking me what on earth I was doing, and Tifa had this smile on her face whenever he said that."

Garrod, sitting across from him with his arm around Tifa, scowled. There was something different about him, however, something that Caris could not define either in the physical sense or the mental sense, but he was much more settled, much more peaceful. The green eyes caught his gaze, and the scowl relaxed into a smile.

"I had a hunch," Garrod said simply.

"What were you doing in the capital?" Caris said.

Looks were exchanged between Tifa and Garrod, and then Olba and Garrod, and Caris caught something flashing between the first pair and the second pair, but it was gone too quickly for him to catch it.

"I was taking a well-deserved vacation," Garrod said at last, and Caris did not press him, but then he smiled and squeezed Tifa's shoulders slightly, and she leaned into him. "Doing things I should have done a long time ago. It's good to be back."

Caris nodded.

Garrod flashed him a grin. "It was nice in the capital. I got to see Jamil. I guess you've been there though."

"I've been there."

There was an awkward silence until finally, Olba stood and folded his arms across his chest. "Well, it's time for dinner, and since we can't order out -" scowling at the rain, "-Garrod and I will do the honors."

Caris looked up at Olba, and Olba looked away. Now is not the time, his expression said, and Caris accepted that too, though he wanted to jump up and grab the other's shoulders, confront him, ask him if he'd seen his brother, why everything seemed so quiet and secretive here, and what he had been doing this entire time away from home.

But instead, he listened to Garrod grumble and then get up from the table, following Olba's back into the kitchen, and then it was just him and Tifa at the kitchen table. He took another sip of his tea.

"I'm glad you made it," Tifa said.

"It's raining," Caris said, with a quirk of the lips. "I almost didn't. I was very close to getting off the train, buying a return ticket, and going home."

"I'm sorry I had to do this," she responded, giving him another gentle smile. "But that is one of the burdens of being a Newtype. We are sometimes called where we do not want to go." Studying him through her folded hands. "How have you been?"

He laughed. "Do you really have to ask that? You're a Newtype."

Tifa didn't take the bait. "Emotions are private things. I will not read your mind without your permission. You know that."

Caris looked down at his teacup. "That doesn't change a thing."

"Caris-"

"All I want," Caris said, "Is my friend back."

She arched one eyebrow. "Is that so?"

"What do you want me to do?" he said in a low voice. "You have brought me here, for what purpose? How can my presence alone change anything?"

"You believed in Olba," she said. "Now it's time for you to believe that you are worth something to him. Don't argue," she continued when he tried to protest. "you were the one who saved him when no one would have him. He's been your world for the past two years, hasn't he?"

"I thought...he needed my help. I thought..." he trailed off.

"He does need your help," Tifa said softly. "But I cannot tell you how to give it. Your bond with him is stronger than mine."

"And how does that help anything?"

"Except for that, I'll tell you anything you want to know," she said. "I told you, for you, it's time for the war to end. You have been helping Olba, but yet no one has been helping you."

"I want to know why you've been talking to me in my dreams. I want to know why you brought me here when you knew that Olba would be here. I want to know why you brought Olba here when Sh-"

Her chair clattered back from the table as she flew to her feet, and the words disappeared from his tongue, leaving his mouth feeling dry. "Don't mention that name," she said warningly, with a meaningful glance back at the kitchen.

"Why not?" he asked, knowing it was a facetious question, knowing that besides the tension between himself and Olba, something was very wrong and that he had felt it when he walked in the door, but had not wanted to acknowledge it.

Tifa seemed to hunch over on herself, and he was once again reminded of how small she was, how fragile. "Shagia lost his memory," she said at last. "Along with other things, after the war. He doesn't...remember."

_I wish I could have known your brother. _

He was not a good person. But...I loved him all the same.

Olba found him a little later, standing with his hands in his pockets, staring out at the rain again from the window of the living room. He knew it was Olba, knew what the other was here for, but again didn't turn around.

"Is there anything," Olba said at last, "that I can say or do to make you forgive me?"

"You can turn back time," Caris said. "That's about the only thing, I am thinking."

Olba sighed explosively. "You haven't changed, have you?"

From the kitchen came the muffled sound of Garrod's voice and Tifa's laughter, and Caris turned his head slightly to glance at the triangle of yellow light shining through the doorway, contrasting sharply with the dusky black-gray of the room in which the two of them stood. He said nothing.

"I was surprised when Garrod came by the history room one night and said he wanted to talk," Olba went on, "and I was even more surprised when we went into the back corner and he punched me in the face." Caris turned around at that, and Olba touched his right cheek gingerly. "He didn't draw blood, but there was a nice purple bruise there for about two days. Then after that, he held out his hand and said that we were even."

"Did you punch him back?"

"God knows I wanted to." Olba shook his head wryly. "But no, I shook his hand, wondering what the hell was going on, and then he said that someone had taught him old grudges and old enemies were just that - old. And it was a new world, so we should make new friends." He hesitated. "That made me think of you."

"I'm flattered," Caris said dryly, but he knew Olba could still hear the hurt behind the sarcasm.

"Don't do this, Caris," Olba said.

"Don't do what?"

"Make this any harder than it already is."

"You were the one who left," Caris pointed out. "I took you in, and then you left."

Olba crossed his arms over his chest. "You sound like I owe you some kind of favor."

Caris favored him with a pointed stare. "Don't you?"

Olba was quiet for a moment. "You took me in, that is true," he said. "You saved me from the law. That's true also. But...Caris, I can't depend on you forever. You knew that one day, we would eventually go our separate ways. It couldn't be helped."

"And I am not Shagia," Caris said dully.

The silence was strained. "No," Olba said at last, voice choked. "No. You're not. It was...wrong of me. I had to go, before..."

Caris knew the answer before he asked the question, but it had to be voiced. "Have you-"

"He lives in the city," Olba answered quietly. "Three houses down from the dockmaster's station. He works there. He's an accountant."

"I...see," Caris murmured. There didn't seem to be any other answer to that statement.

"He doesn't-"

"I know," he said, before Olba had to say it. There was a dull throbbing in his skull, and he didn't know if it was him, or maybe Olba, or maybe even Tifa, but it was oppressive and he could feel it throbbing in time with the beating of the rain on the windowpanes. "Tifa told me. You don't have to say it - I know."

"It's all right," Olba said, sounding like he was talking to himself. "It's the same, though he's alive. He doesn't remember, and he's happy that way. I'm glad for him."

"Olba-"

Olba closed his eyes. "No, it's all right. What I live with every day: the pain, the memories, the suffering, the guilt...he doesn't have that. He has a good life, has good friends, has people who love him, and that is all that anyone could ask for."

"I'm sorry," Caris began, and Olba took two large steps forward and touched his shoulder awkwardly, just a soft, barely-there touch that said, _I am here now, and everything is all right_. He felt the hot tears squeezing out at the corners of his eyes. He couldn't remember the last time he had cried.

"It's not anyone's fault," Olba murmured. "The war, everything. It is simply history, and the way of things." He dropped his arm, and Caris stepped away, dashing tears from his cheeks in hard, sharp motions, as if that could erase the fact that he had ever cried at all.

"History lies, sometimes," he said.

Olba didn't respond, simply dug around in one pocket and pulled out a messily wrapped package and handed it to him. "Here."

"What's this?"

"You know what it is," Olba said.

Caris looked down at the small package, feeling the weight of it, the weight of tens of thousands of words poured straight from the heart onto crisp, printed sheets of paper, bound, printed in inked black letters that formed the structure of one man's confession.

"You'll be the first one to read it. Like I promised."

--------------------------

He only read half of the book that night; could only read half because every few pages he would be blinded by tears again and have to stop to wipe them away. The war had never been so vivid in his memory as when he was reading Olba's words, and in the middle of the night a plan formed in his mind, a plan so ludicrous that he told himself that it would never work. But yet the idea would not leave him, and as he tossed and turned in bed, listening to the rain that was still falling, he knew that he had to do something.

The next morning when he woke up, the house was empty. He ate breakfast alone and sat there at the kitchen table for almost an hour just watching the wind and the sunlight outside on the trees. He wondered what Shagia Frost was doing now. At work on this fine morning, most likely. His mind sculpted the imagined visage of the older Frost brother out of the air in front of him - strong cheekbones, dark, curling hair, commanding, scornful stare. Was that really how he looked? Or had his Newtype-addled brain simply imagined it?

There was only one way to find out.

The house was on the outskirts, but it was only a brisk ten-minute walk to the center of the village, and navigation of the roads was no problem. Fifteen minutes later, he found himself in the middle of the village marketplace. Twenty minutes later, he was the proud owner of a bag of fresh strawberries, a hat, and a wooden toy train, with the old lady at the last stall waving at him and smiling toothily, like he had just given her the world. He supposed that smile had been worth the few pennies he had spent on the toy train. Maybe Olba would want it. That thought made him laugh.

He left before he could spend more money on frivolous things, stopping once to ask directions to the dockyards, and then spending about a minute standing in front of the building, staring at the sign, wondering what the best way to go about it was. He occupied himself by tucking his marketplace purchases into the bag, then hesitated.

"You can walk on in," a pleasant voice said behind him. "We're friendly people."

Perhaps it was that his mind had been occupied, or maybe other man's memory loss had put some sort of mental block on his brain, but Caris had not felt Shagia Frost come up behind him at all, had a small jolt of surprise when he turned to see the smile on that pale face, the thin, atrophied legs in that mechanical chair.

"Good morning," he said. "You're the accountant? I was actually hoping to come find you."

Shagia's raised eyebrow was a mirror image of Olba's. "Oh? Do you have a transaction?"

"Something of the sort," Caris said, and Shagia smiled again.

"That's no problem. Follow me in, and I'll see what I can do for you."

He started the wheelchair, and Caris followed him through the automatic doorway, through the crowded front lobby, where the secretary turned as the door opened, and waved a greeting.

"Morning, Garrod."

"Good morning," Shagia responded, and Caris blinked in surprise. Garrod?

"Your name's Garrod?" he questioned, as Shagia maneuvered his chair into his office and Caris followed, seated himself on one of the overstuffed chairs in front of his desk. "Are you new here? I haven't seen you around before."

Shagia hesitated, the briefest of pauses, and Caris would not have caught it if he hadn't been looking for it, waiting. "Yes," he said at last. "I'm fairly new here. What about you? I haven't seen you around either." His face was longer, more square than Olba's, but the eyes were the same and the noses were the same, and there was something in his expression, too, that was similar. But where Olba's eyes were piercing, direct, Shagia's were hesitant, questioning.

_He doesn't remember, and he's happy that way. I'm glad for him._

Caris folded his hands in front of him. "I moved away a few years ago, and I'm just in town visiting relatives."

"I see," Shagia said, sounding a little uncertain, like he really didn't see but was just saying that, and Caris gave him his best businessman smile, snapping into the familiar elegant, formal posture. One should project confidence at all times, Nomoa had taught him, and that, at least, was one thing Caris knew how to do well. "Anyway, can I help you? You said you had some financial matters to take care of?"

Caris flashed him another businessman smile. "I'd like to open an account here with the docks. Establish a presence here so to speak."

Shagia gave him a long, considering look. "You plan to move back here then?"

Caris shook his head. "No, but I do have vested interest in some of the property here. You could say I'm a..." he hesitated, as if searching for a word, "investor. I like to have investments wherever I am, for future planning, of sorts. I own an estate up in the hills by the Federation capital, though, and I consider that my place of permanent residence."

"I see," Shagia said again, and Caris waited, knowing from the tone of his voice that there was something more.

"Is there a problem?" he said at last.

"Let me tell you something," Shagia said slowly, drawing out the syllables, as if trying to reword the sentence as he spoke it, to make it better. "I haven't been here that long myself. But it would be an extremely foolish move to try and invest in property here for the sake of technological advancement." He gestured out the window. "This town is rustic, yes, and might be considered 'quaint', but it's what makes it unique, and its residents prefer it that way. If you try and come in with promises of industry, you might just find yourself driven out of here."

Caris resisted the urge to smile, instead leaned forward intently. "Believe me when I say that is absolutely not what I intend. I did say I have relatives here, yes? Durnham is almost like a second home to me, and I would never do anything to change it from how the residents wish it."

Shagia nodded, but Caris could see he was not satisfied. He waited.

"I do not like people lying to me," Shagia said at last, eyes hooded under heavy black brows, though Caris could still feel their heat, just a shadow of the power Shagia once had, but powerful nonetheless. "Perhaps it's just something that I've had too much of in my short life, but liars are never acceptable. Under any means."

He started to open his mouth to utter more platitudes, to soothe Shagia with more of his businessman's flatterings, and then stopped. This was Shagia Frost, one-time enemy turned wary friend, and Shagia might have lost his power, but anyone had the power to unmask a liar.

More than anyone, Shagia deserved to know the truth.

"I'm a friend of Tifa Adil's," Caris said at last. "I won't lie to you."

--------------------------

Caris waited two days before going back, and spent the next day scouting out possible properties around the village. Olba helped him, idly curious. "You've got money to burn, I suppose," his friend said, "and I understand why you would like to come visit your friends once in a while, but still, isn't buying a whole property a bit much?"

Caris laughed. "Investment is always wise. I really do like it here. Besides, if you get tired of the capital, you're always welcome to move in here."

He finally found a plot of land that suited him; a little smaller than any of the vast estates that he was accustomed to, but it seemed wrong somehow for a village like Durnham to have anything else but homey cottages and tiny, one-story houses with thatched roofs. Shagia had promised to help him with the paperwork necessary to transfer funds from his account to the village bank, and a week after he had made his first trek down to the docks, Caris decided he liked the property enough to buy it.

He finished Olba's book that night, slept uncomfortably plagued by odd dreams, and Tifa was in the kitchen when he came in for breakfast the next morning. When he looked at her, she gave him another smile, picked up her bag from the chair next to the door, and said simply, "Good luck today."

That, of course, did not surprise him.

_It isn't over for you yet either._

Sometimes he wondered what she saw when she looked at him, but then he thought about what he saw when he looked at others, and thought it was most likely the same for her - a little clearer, perhaps, a little stronger, but mostly the same.

Caris knocked on Olba's door after he ate, but no one answered, and when he opened it, the room was empty. Olba might have gone with Garrod to work this morning, which was fine with him.

He picked up his copy of Olba's book from his own room, tucked it into his bag, and wondered if he was crazy. No crazier than the people he called friends, he decided, and locked the house door carefully behind him. When he walked into the accounting office, Shagia was there waiting for him.

"Good morning, Mr. Adil," he said, smiling easily. "I heard you've been scouting about in the hills up north. Did you find what you were looking for?"

"I did," Caris returned, reaching out and shaking Shagia's outstretched hand. "What's the first thing I need to do to buy a property around here?"

Shagia rose from his chair, and Caris followed him into his office, closing the door. "I've got the book in here. It isn't anything too hard, but I need information on any other private properties you might own, either around the country or anywhere else in the world."

Caris waved a negligent hand, then unzipped his bag and made a great show of digging around in it. "Nothing too hard, I imagine. I have a few papers-"

The door opened.

"Oh, hello," Shagia said. "I met you the other day, didn't I?"

It was the second time that day that he had not felt someone coming up behind him, but this time there was no excuse, because Olba's startled face was almost a mirror image of Shagia's as he stared at Caris, taking one step into the room. He felt a flash of hurt from the other man, quickly hidden, at Shagia's words.

"What are you doing he-"

"Shut the door," Shagia said abruptly, and Caris stopped rummaging. That voice was not the Shagia of a few minutes ago, the friendly docks accountant. It was a voice with a core of iron, one used to command. He turned to stare at Shagia, who was looking a little dazed, as if he did not even know where that had come from.

Olba opened his mouth, then snapped it shut and turned sharply on his heel and slammed the door.

"Go home, Caris," he said, not turning around.

"I thought you were at work with Garrod," Caris returned. "Were you following me?"

"You've been acting strange," Olba muttered. "I knew you were up to no good. What's gotten into you? This isn't a game!"

"Don't you think I know that?" Caris shot back, ignoring Shagia's confused stare. "Don't tell me what to do, Olba. You know me better than that."

"History has been written!" Olba barked. "Who are you to change it? This is my life, not yours!"

"The war is over," Caris said. "It's a new world. And perhaps history can be rewritten, too."

"You-" Olba began, and Caris moved to cut him off, but something stopped him, told him no, not that. He hardly even realized when his hand grasped the book inside the bag and drew it out.

"What's that?" Shagia demanded sharply.

"_The world will remember Shagia Frost as a murderer and a traitor_," Caris read, smoothing the page with sweaty palms, "_but I can only remember him as that touch in my mind, the voice in my head. I lived with that for so long that it is difficult even now to bear it. Many days I wake up alone in the middle of the night and feel deep inside that something is missing. It tears at my heart. It is like a terrible gash right through my soul that will never be taken away, but I will have to live with it for the rest of my life._"

"Caris-" Olba burst out, sounding panicked, but Caris ignored him. He knew it was coming before Olba lunged, tried to knock him out of the chair, but Caris had already stood and backed up against the wall, eyes glued to the page, not daring to glance up. Olba toppled over the now-empty chair and crashed to the floor on one knee.

"_My brother told me we were special. And he was right. We were special. What my brother did not tell me was that we were not the only ones who were special, because that word means so many different things that I never knew. Every single human being on this planet is born with some talent, some gift that no other person has, and for one person or a pair of people to single themselves out as special, as naturally superior, has no purpose._"

He felt it from Shagia then, the first twinge of something resembling emotion, a spike, a peak of something unnamed, and Olba gave a sharp, thin cry, clutching at his head. Shagia's breathing quickened.

"Who are you?" he questioned harshly.

Caris felt the tears at the backs of his eyes again, kept his eyes on the words, knew that if he tried to look up, to look at either brother, he would start to weep. Something was building in the air, like lightning.

"_The Newtypes and those who used them understood that in the end. We, however, did not._"

Shagia's sense was tortured now. He could hear the older man's gasping breathing, and Caris had to struggle to stay upright through the waves of mental anguish piercing through his own mind. A mental block was made of layers, the rational part of his brain told him, and peeling away the layers required suffering.

"_I suppose that the burden I bear now is fitting penance for what I have done, though maybe there is nothing in this world that can erase my sins. My brother is dead, and maybe even that is not enough. I believed in the concept of vengeance-_"

Olba made a keening noise of pain and doubled over.

The air was full of sparks.

_The war will never be over because for him, there was no resolution. _

For you, also, it is time for the war to end.

He gritted his teeth, forced the words from between his lips. There were black and white spots in front of his eyes, and he could barely breathe. "_-until he disappeared from my life, and I think that vengeance has been served. I think that justice has been done as much as it is able to be-_"

"Stop, Caris," Olba breathed raggedly. "Stop it...stop..."

He took a deep breath and then he saw Tifa Adil again, standing in her shop looking outside the window, a paintbrush in one hand and a look on her face of joy, of hope.

Strength.

_The war_, she said clearly, her voice like a clear bell through the sunlight, _ends now._

"_-I don't regret that,_" Caris rasped, "_because I loved him_."

A sound like thunder, and Olba cried out, collapsed against the floor. Caris felt his legs buckle beneath him and his skull being squeezed into a million pieces, compressing and expanding until he felt that he could encompass the whole world in one glance, billions of living organisms spinning round and round and then it would expand until he could hold the whole galaxy, the whole universe, all of that history in his hands. But no, it was they that held him, spinning him round and round, and he could not breathe, could not hear, could not see.

Something shattered, shards falling away into nothing.

Someone screamed. Maybe it was Olba, or maybe it was Shagia.

Or maybe it was himself.

--------------------------

The pounding on the door jerked him into wakefulness, and he opened his eyes gingerly, found himself sprawled on the floor, the book still clutched in his hand.

The door rattled in its frame. "Open up!" someone shouted from the other side, and someone else tried the lock again. He ignored the voices, dropping the book on the floor, touching his face as he always did when he had a nightmare, to make sure that he was still alive.

There was something different about the room, but he could not at first figure out what it was. His mind was hazy. How much time had passed?

Where was Olba? Shagia?

"Olba?" he choked. There seemed to be massive quantities of dust in the air of the room. His throat was dry.

"Caris," Olba's voice said from beside him, and then he coughed. "Here."

"Are you-" he stopped to take a deep breath. "Are you all right?" He struggled to his feet and held out an unsteady hand to pull Olba to his feet. "Are you-"

Olba's hands were cold, his face stunned. "Caris? I think..."

Movement. Caris froze, looked over at the man behind the desk, felt Olba's muscles tense under his fingers like springs. Olba was shaking, too, breath coming in small hiccups, wrapping his arms around himself and staring at the man in the wheelchair.

_Niisan?_

With a start, Caris realized that he could feel them, both of them, the single mental link running like spun glass from one man to the other. It was weak and it was fragile, but it was there. He felt hurriedly for Olba's consciousness, felt for that raw, bloody spot that had been there since he had first stepped in the door of Caris' home that day two years ago, and felt the thin glass link wrapping around it, pulsing faintly, alive. There was no pain now, only a sense of being whole.

He felt Olba's shock, the unbelieving joy, and the only thing he could think of was that at last, the war's orphan child had come home.

_I don't regret that, because I loved him._

"Olba," Shagia said, wonder in his face, with the tone of a man waking from a long dream. "It's you."

--------------------------  
_Will your sorcery ever show / The sleeping bride shut in her bower  
The day wreathed in its mound of snow / And time locked in his tower?  
_--------------------------

It was only later that he realized that in that moment, he had understood why Olba loved Shagia, why even through all the pain and the guilt he could not let go of his brother's memory. It was not any obsession, it was not for any sort of tribute, and it was not in any quest for vengeance. Shagia was not a god, nor was he a devil. And it was not that he, Caris Nautilus, was not good enough to be a replacement.

One human being could not replace another. There was Shagia, and there was Caris, and to Olba, they were both precious.

It was simply that in the end, Shagia had also been a man who had loved his brother.

History could not be changed, but there was nothing that said it could not be rewritten in the future - not written over, but added on to as years went by and lessons were learned so that future generations would not repeat the mistakes of the last one. And time, too would go on, until the memories of all wars had faded and the earth was whole again, and he and Olba and Shagia and Tifa and Garrod and Jamil and all of the others who had come to this point were only one single person with one set of memories, one heart, only one path of history.

_Once, there was a war..._

**25 February 2004**


	6. Story Notes

**NOTES on _The Bronze Labyrinth_: 26 Feb 04**

This was originally intended to be a series of four stories, loosely interconnected to tell a full story but not limited to the confines of a "series fic." That original idea didn't change much throughout, though I ended up expanding it to five stories instead of four when I felt like four was too restrictive to the natural flow of the plot.

I guess you can say that this fic is really about the Frost brothers, which is ironic because I don't like them at all in the TV series. The one main gripe that I had about Gundam X as a TV series was that the characterization was one-sided: the "good guys" were given plenty of screen time and development, while the "bad guys" were reduced to almost mere stereotypes. Shagia and Olba had a lot of villain potential, but we never really got to see much of that. Instead, they were relegated to spouting a lot of one-line evil threats. It seemed like the producers stuck them in the series so that they could check off the "cool-looking villain" square.

That was mostly the reason I decided to write about them. I wanted to bring the Frost brothers from stereotypes into real people, to give them more than just one-dimensional personalities. The TV series hints at deeper characterization at times, but we never see it. I suppose I considered it a personal challenge to do that for them. I wanted to take Shagia's drive for perfection and Olba's obsession with his brother and turn that into something that would make them real in the eyes of the audience.

In case you were wondering, this is not really an AU fic. Shagia and Olba actually do not die at the end of the series; in the last scene where the camera is panning out from Garrod and Tifa and the two guys trying to convince the audience they are Newtypes, you can see Olba and Shagia at the corner of the screen. Shagia is in a wheelchair and Olba is pushing him.

The initial inspiration for this story was taken from an unfinished series fic, Redemption, by Kouri. I credit most of my beginning ideas, if not all of them, to her fic, which is an AU fic that also takes place after the series, in which Shagia loses his memory and Olba must try to take care of him and restore it. I liked the premise of it, but the fic was only 2 chapters long, and it seems to be abandoned. I wrote Kouri and asked if she was going to continue it, but didn't get a reply.

Naturally, being an author, the little voice inside my head told me I had to write something to remedy that. I don't consider _The Bronze Labyrinth_ to be a copy of Kouri's story, because mine looks at things from a totally different angle, with an entirely different format as well. I merely credit her for the idea and inspiration.

I took the titles and inserts in each individual fic from songs, poems, works of literature. I tried to stay away from the standard pop song "songfic" format, and only one of the insert songs is even recent or mainstream enough to be considered a "pop" song, and that is Sting's _The Soul Cages_, which is Olba's part II (but I wouldn't classify it as one). I'm not sure why this kind of format appealed to me at first, but it felt fitting to match the characters up like that. Looking at it now, _The Bronze Labyrinth_ is mostly a story about the passage of time and how the world before the war and after the war are at odds with each other, and how the characters are still struggling to find their place in it. As the insert works I chose also all deal with that concept, they highlight the theme of each character's section.

**I. LA CASA DEL ASTERION** (The House of Asterion) is by Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentinian writer, and is a semi-retelling of the legend of the Minotaur (Asterion) from the Minotaur's point of view. I wanted to portray Shagia in the same kind of situation - bounded by a labyrinth with no doors, but yet from which he cannot really escape because he has no concept of the outside world. He is waiting for someone or something to rescue him. Asterion's concept of freedom is death, but Shagia isn't sure what his definition of freedom is.

Besides the fact that I took inspiration from Kouri's fic, I decided to have him lose his memory because I wanted to see how he would react having to relearn everything all over again. Shagia in the anime was always supremely calm, controlled, very in charge of his surroundings. What would a Shagia who had that stripped away do? How would he react? These things I wanted to explore.

I really don't have much to say about Catarina except that she represents the common folk that Shagia so despised. If he had met her before the war, he would have thought nothing of her because she was not "special." Now, however, he envies the fact that she is able to lead such a normal life.

**II. WHERE THE OCEANS DIE** is from the lyrics of the Sting song _The Soul Cages_, which I mentioned above. The complete song reads like a poem, and I didn't realize until after I was almost done with Olba's part how perfectly the lyrics mirror Olba's and Caris' situation. The concept of forgiveness and redemption plays a key role in Olba's section. Olba here is a man without a purpose, without a cause, because he believes that Shagia is dead. In the TV series, it is rather painfully obvious that if Shagia told Olba that the sky was purple, Olba would believe him, so I wanted to separate him from his brother and all of those memories, leave him alone and see if he would grow up.

The similarities between Caris and Olba, as Caris states, are striking. I believe that Caris is the only character in the series who could hope to have helped Olba in any way. Jamil or Lancelow could be others, but they are too much older than Olba and could not have reached him on that same level. Caris, having at one time believed he was "special" and then had that belief refuted, has much more to offer to Olba in that regard.

**III. THE QUEEN OF THE FAIRIES** is the Scottish ballad of Tam Lin, a knight who was captured by the Fairy Queen while out hunting and is cursed to serve the fairy realm. He waits for young women at a well and then rapes them. The girl Janet, who is taken and raped by him and conceives his child, vows to release him from his bondage and succeeds in doing so. I warped the meaning of the ballad a little in Tifa's section; no one is raped, obviously. But the concept of aiding the enemy remains.

Tifa is my least favorite main character in Gundam X, and she was very hard to write. Ironically, her section is the longest of all of them (14 pages in 10 pt font). I knew when I started writing it that I wanted her and Shagia to meet. It seemed inevitable in my mind, that Shagia would come to find the counsel of a Newtype just like his brother had the counsel of another Newtype. This wasn't because of any belief on my part that Newtypes could "teach" the former Category Fs anything, but rather because Newtypes after the war are also considered fairly useless, unwanted, discarded in the "new society" that is being created. Shagia is lost, but Tifa is, in a sense, also lost. She seeks solace in her new, mundane life in the village with Toniya and Witz and Garrod, but I don't believe she is happy.

Meeting Shagia, being able to share his pain, brings Tifa a new awareness. Shagia becomes, to her, the embodiment of the war's aftermath. Making peace with him is her way of making peace with the past, and that is why she tells Garrod to go. She knows they cannot both go on living the lie, and Garrod must find his own peace before he can be with her.

**IV. QUAND LA LUNE EST HAUTE** is from the Sarah Brightman song _La Lune_, which is sung in French. However, I cheated a bit because there are four lines spoken/chanted in the beginning in English, and this one, "when the moon is high," is one of them. I took the liberty to translate it into French because the rest of the song is French.

The moon is a prominent symbol throughout this whole series, and it all relates back to Garrod and his Gundam X/Double X. The moon haunts Shagia and it haunts Garrod most out of all of them, for obvious reasons. There are many ways to characterize the moon, and it has been made into all kinds of symbols throughout history and literature. I think I said it best when Garrod tells Cryant, "I don't hate the moon, but I don't love it, either. There's so much mysticism about the moon...so much that the moon represents, and yet whenever I look at it, I think of death." Garrod's mistrust of Shagia's intentions toward Tifa are in part comprised of that: a man who he thought he had killed has come back from the dead.

Garrod's section is the shortest out of all of them, because I don't think there was too much to say. Garrod is a very simple character - simple and true to what he believes. He doesn't require long-winded introspection to get the job done, and I think the length of his story was just right.

**V. THE CRYSTAL MIRROR** is a line from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem _The Lady of Shallott_, about Elaine of Astolat, a maiden who dies of a broken heart because Lancelot doesn't love her. The rest of the poetry in Caris' fic is the poem _Merlin_, by Edwin Muir.

Caris' final section brings the storylines together in sort of a weird weaving of timelines. I chose the King Arthur legend here because the main theme of Caris' part is "history," how history is recorded and passed down, how people will remember the war in the future, how history/the past is not something that can be changed, but sometimes is wrongly recorded and can be misleading. The Arthurian legend is an example of history that has been distorted until it has become a larger than life collection of fairytales. Caris is someone who desperately searches for the truth, and his resolve to chronicle the truth and only the truth is representative of that.

That gets him in trouble, however, when dealing with Olba and then Shagia. Caris' world after the war consists of himself and Olba. He has never been close to another human being before, and he ultimately begins to cling to Olba just as Olba had clung to Shagia. Olba recognizes this, but Caris does not - cannot, because he's never experienced it. This strange relationship mixes itself up in Caris' mind with Olba's recollections of Shagia, with Caris' own desire to rewrite history and keep Olba close to him even as he tells himself he won't.

I didn't want Shagia to regain his memory right away when he saw Olba, because I don't think things are like that all the time. Shagia and Olba were incredibly close and had an amazing mental bond, but still, two years is a long time and they have been living separate lives away from each other, each having found their own selves. I wanted Caris to bring them together. Caris is a character that bridges a lot of gaps - from normal human to Newtype, from ruler of a city to humble civilian, from tortured boy to hopeful man. More than anyone in this show, I think, Caris embodies the idea of turning around, looking away from a tainted past and gazing toward the future.

The title for the overall story is based on another Borges short story, "The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths" (there is a brass labyrinth in there which I changed to bronze) from his collection "The Aleph" (from which "La Casa del Asterion" is also found). The entire series of those stories deal with the concept of the labyrinth, and I wanted to evoke the feeling of a world rebuilding from the ground up, organized chaos, feelings of hope and hopelessness all in one. The world of "after war" is very much a labyrinth in this sense.

To those who do read (Laurel, Vitani, Tin? there are woefully few GX fans out there, but maybe some shall find this fic), hope you enjoyed.


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